The Pirate Cinema – Displaying Downloads As They Happen
Not only The Pirate Bay goes past the tremendous pressure of being a cast out, but it does so in style, with a little help we might add. The Pirate Cinema, a project by two enlightened minds, is putting downloads on the big screen (well, there are actually three of them). The room, besides the screens, has a viewing area (just like a movie theatre) for people to see downloads as they happen. Out of a mixture of 100 torrent swarms, TPC creates a new image (literally) about torrenting.
While millions upon millions of file-sharers use The Pirate Bay , third parties are also keeping their eyes peeled for IP addresses, file hashes, and anything that could build a scientific report on file-sharing, a copyright lawsuit or a list of IP addresses for the six-strikes program.
Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell are the two who came up with this daring idea. The Pirate Cinema takes the process of sharing and turns it into images.
If you happen to be at the Sight and Sound Festival in Canada, then you’ll have the chance of seeing what Nicolas and Brendan did – a room with three gigantic screens and a whole lot of computers connected to them.
“An aspect of the concept was to reuse the surveillance systems used by corporations, ISP’s and governments, for other purposes,” Maigret told TF.
“On the other hand, the idea was also to monitor the usages or activity of people on a large scale, and to capture the vivid activity of the communities involved in sharing practices. Lastly, I really wanted to consider this ongoing activity as a live infinite Mashup – a snapshot of global file disseminations,” the artist continued.
TPC’s core is made of Python and Libtorrent.
“The idea was to use only the necessary functions – a few lines of code, and to build our tool around it,” Maigret explained.
“Then we developed all the monitoring parts and later the decoding process using Gstreamer.”
There are two different ways in which the project can be displayed. First, downloads of the most popular torrents (hosted on TPB) are shown as fragments on the screen(s).
“The setup can involve as many as five computers, each monitoring the site for different kinds of files for a few minutes before gathering fresh input,” TF writes.
The second modus operandi is in the form of a live performance. Movie and music files are hand-picked, sort to say, by the operator, and then played just like you do with an instrument. Besides that, the three screens also show the IP addresses and their location.
“BitTorrent was a deliberate choice for many reasons. First of all it’s really a Peer-to-Peer architecture and that’s important even symbolically – people/peers are at both sides of each action,” Maigret said.
“Also BitTorrent is not only about mainstream medias, but theoretically open to all kinds of files and content. In a way, the Pirate Cinema reveals some potentials of this peer-based technical architecture.”
And since this is a peer-to-peer based project…
“This fragmentation loosens the exchanges between different recipients. A file can then be recomposed sample by sample until it is complete, from snippets emanating from separate users and in a disorderly manner. From a cinematic perspective this preliminary fragmentation of the media is also a fragmentation of the film material and of the narration,” Maigret continued to explain.
“It creates many formal specificities: random editing, weaving together different films frame by frame, glitches and merging of different fragments. When watching the installation, we can’t help ourselves interpreting the flows, it produces lots of connections and new narrations, from those chance combinations.”
As far as security and privacy is concerned….
“We saw it as a kind of game. Ever since the beginning of the project, we anticipated the operating modes of the system so that it could be presentable regardless of different countries’ legislations. For example, an encrypted connection to Sweden (iPredator / The Pirate Bay) is used to anonymize each machine used in the project. Fragments of the files are encoded and remain on our machine only temporarily.”
