10/04, 10h, DMLL Seminar Room
The Pirate Cinema
Nicolas Maigret
The hidden activity and geography of real-time peer-to-peer file sharing via BitTorrent is revealed in The Pirate Cinema an online piece by Nicolas Maigret. In this monitoring room, omnipresent telecommunications surveillance gains a global face, as the program plunders the core of restless activity online, revealing how visual media is consumed and disseminated across the globe. This live work produces an arbitrary mash-up of the BitTorrent files being exchanged in real time, based on the traffic of the Pirate Bay’s top100 videos. These fragmentary contents in transit are monitored, transforming BitTorrent network users (unknown to them) into contributors to an endless audio-visual composition. http://thepiratecinema.com/installation/
The Pirate Cinema Read Me
Maria Roszkowska and Nicolas Maigret
“The Pirate Cinema Read Me” is a work in progress planned for fall 2015. This publication offers a critical view on piracy wars and multiple feedbacks between contemporary issues and historical piracy facts. This book structured in three parts, starts with “The Pirate Cinema” art piece and expands on broader issues raised by the project (historical and modern anti-piracy technologies + anti-piracy trials, geo-specific issues, piracy sub-scenes, main releasing standards, warez release procedure, suppliers methods, online piracy in numbers…). http://thepiratecinema.com/book/
Tropa(s) de Elite: of the forms created within informal media
Gabriel Menotti
A particular plasticity of informal media is brought forth by works such as The Pirate Cinema (Nicolas Maigret) and The Piracy Project (AND Publishing), which highlight the formal effects of lo-fi, partial, or unsupervised reproduction processes. Traces of the circumstances of copying let themselves be shown in the copies, underlining their difference from a purported original and sometimes from one another. Seen in a positive light, this heterogeneity implies that reproduction entails forms of labour able to generate aesthetic singularities. This paper take this hypothesis further in an exploration of the limits of piracy as poeisis, turning to the sequels of the blockbuster Tropa de Elite (José Padilha, 2007) that were created within the informal market. Resulting from gestures of extreme appropriation, the existence of these counterfeit titles reveals a paradox of current media circuits, in equal measures predictable and unreliable. By analysing what these works may accomplish symbolically, I mean to examine how the consistence of the movie both as a media entity and a visual commodity is built in relation to its surroundings.