The Pirate Cinema (NSFW)

This truly fascinating project by Nicolas Maigret was developed over the last 2 years for usage as an interactive art exhibit, turning raw streams of monitored Bit torrent data into visual snippets at a machine gun pace. As well as displaying the jarring tastes of audio-visual content, IP addresses and countries are displayed to give viewers an impression of the global nature of content consumption and distribution. Considering that the data being extracted is from incomplete torrent chunks, the entire project also turns into an amazing glitch fest.

A visualized torrent chunk of PSY's Gagnam Style being transferred from Italy to Australia

In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, 'The Pirate Cinema' reveals the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing. 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.