THE PIRATE CINEMA (2012-2014)



THE PIRATE CINEMA IS A COMPOSITION GENERATED BY THE ACTIVITY ON FILE SHARING NETWORKS

INSTALLATION VERSION > In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing visible. The project is presented as a monitoring room, which shows Peer-to-Peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an arbitrary cut-up of the files currently being exchanged. This immediate and fragmentary rendering of digital activity, with information concerning its source and destination, thus depicts the topology of digital media consumption and uncontrolled content dissemination in a connected world.

Dedicated website: Installation version / Online version / Performance version
Conception: Nicolas Maigret - 2012-2014 | Software development: Brendan Howell & Jean-Marie Boyer
Production: ArtKillArt, La Maison populaire | Supports: CNC / DICREAM






PERFORMANCE VERSION > The hidden activity and geography of real-time peer-to-peer file sharing via BitTorrent is revealed in The Pirate Cinema, a live performance by Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell. In their monitoring room, omnipresent telecommunications surveillance gains a global face, as the artists plunder the core of restless activity online, revealing how visual media is consumed and disseminated across the globe. Each act of this live work produces an arbitrary mash-up of the BitTorrent files being exchanged, in real time, in a specific media category, including music, audio books, movies, porn, documentaries, video games and more. These fragmentary contents in transit are browsed by the artist, transforming BitTorrent network users (unknown to them) into contributors to an endless audio-visual composition.





The Pirate Cinema - Live @ Transmediale 2015