The Pirate Cinema
May 29 - May 31, 2014
Seattle premiere!
Join us for post-show discussions with the artist!
The hidden activity and geography of real-time peer-to-peer file sharing via BitTorrent is revealed in The Pirate Cinema, a live installation by digital artist Nicolas Maigret.
In Maigret’s monitoring room, omnipresent telecommunications surveillance gains a global face, as the artist plunders 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 the audio-visual composition that is The Pirate Cinema.
"it’s like Taylor Swift, Bruce Willis, Dr. Who, and a healthy heaping of orgasms all thrown into a blender. . . If you consider the Internet a place, what a kaleidoscopic landscape it is." —Seattle Weekly
Nicolas Maigret is an artist working in digital art and sound since 2001. His work exposes the internal workings of media, through a reflection on their errors, their dysfunctions, their limitations or failure thresholds. After completing studies in inter-media art, Maigret joined the LocusSonus lab in France, where he explored networks as a creative tool. He teaches at École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux and cofounded the collective Art of Failure in 2006. He is also involved with the project Plateforme, an artist-run centre in Paris.
Major support for the 2013-14 season of Live at the Film Forum provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, ArtsFund, 4Culture, the Office of Arts & Culture, Seattle, Washington State Arts Commission, KUOW 94.9 and The Stranger.