jankspace — Jenn Leung

New Models 91: Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung on Jankspace (2025)
https://on.soundcloud.com/tclmnhPSckHFIoLxsY

Jankspace Interview with Ada O Higgins

Medialab Matadero
Presentation & Screening
Dec 2025

Tech preaches of a world that is seamlessly efficient, where mundane tasks are magically taken care of and we are free to focus on meaningful pursuits. But there are thinly disguised cracks in this impeccably polished plan. In this series, Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung explore the gaps between the promise of tech and its reality, in other words what they call “jankspace.”

We attack ourselves with pharmaceuticals, surgeries and filters. But like a dolphin caught in a fishing net and struggling with mercury-induced Alzheimer's (as a recent study has concluded), the human body doesn’t quite fit in the virtual mesh of contemporary life. The body is janky. No matter what we do, it remains organic, vulnerable, inconvenient. It is a decaying piece of matter. The way this jankiness interacts with the evolving digital landscape is jankspace.

In her essay “Cute and/or Janky,” the philosopher Maya B. Kronic discusses Felstead and Leung’s term “jank” and suggests that “jankiness” is one of the predominant modes through which the body can be experienced virtually. Kronic explains that:

Jankspace is how you feel when you just used Touch ID to access your keychain and you’re desperately reaching for the power cord to plug in your phone and get it powered up so that you can get the code from the OTP text message and activate your hotspot so as to get the email confirmation for a password change in time so you can access the cloud storage where you keep the scan of your ID that’s required by the payment app that just asked you to verify the microdeposit sent to your bank so you can buy some shit you saw on Instagram at 2 a.m. after you’d been scrolling liking and subscribing all night, getting impregnated by content so that you can pop out more content tomorrow.

Anyone relate? But there must be a way to move past the dichotomy of salvational or apocalyptic visions of humanity’s future with AI. Rather than submit to the temptations of manic positivity or dismayed technopessimism, “I’m So Janky” proposes a new lens through which to understand the deranged present, narrated by an irresistibly blasé Julia Fox and a seductively imperative Nicki Minaj–two cultural forces that AI could never create.

Episode 1: Welcome to Jankspace, Babes

In 2001 Rem Koolhaas’ came up with the term junkspace for the spaces left unaccounted for in the bureaucratic architecture of modernity. Jankspace is similarly the empty space in the digital network of technocapitalism that we fill with our human bodies. Take a seat and tune in to find out how ozempic, AI slop, Bryan Johnson, Uber drivers, algorithms and Luigi Mangione are connected.

Episode 2: Literally No Place

Julia Fox takes us on a journey into the AI utopian versus AI doomer cyberwarfare bedlam, exploring the stakes, fears and hopes of all sides. Will AI bring about the post-scarcity society that Marx envisioned, allowing us all to live in labor-less luxury, or will it quite literally extinguish the human race?

Episode 3: The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism

Listen to AI Julia Fox for some grotesque, cringe, messy, perverse and sublime analysis of Facebook’s Metaverse and the increasingly sloppy and frustrating interaction between online and offline life.

Bonus Episode: Always On My Mind

Master linguist and lyrical genius Nicki Minaj considers the ethical, cultural and social implications of the devaluing of language implied by the looming “digital telepathy” of Elon Musk’s $5 billion Neuralink startup, which successfully implanted a brain chip into Norland Arbaugh’s brain, a 30 year old quadriplegic in 2024.

By: Daniel Felstead with Jenn Leung

3D Animation: Red Liu & Qianyu Wang

Score: Isama Zing & DJ GÄP

Translation: Jasmine Ma

Producer: Lauren Boyle

Thanks: Eimcem, K. Allado-McDowell, Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Sam Cummins

Special Thanks: Julia Fox, Maya B. Kronic, and The Internet

Featured Tracks: "Womb" - Doon Kanda, "Shape of You" - Ed Sheeran, "Bailando" - Paradisio, "NUNCA MUDA" - NXGHT/Scythermane, "Dirt Under Your Nails" - Holy Other, "Fooley (Instrumental)" - Kelela, "Wash Over Me (ft. TTristana)" - DJ GÄP, "360" - Charli XCX, "Drifting" - Tiësto, "Nut" - DJ GÄP