Pirate Cinema takes files from BitTorrent and turns them into art

Nicolas Maigret has found an interesting use for internet piracy: creating art. Maigret has a machine in a datacenter in Austria where his Pirate Cinema project downloads and shares the 100 most popular files that are being shared on BitTorrent and then visualizes them by turning them into art. 

Somewhere in a datacenter in Austria there’s a dedicated machine that has only one mission: download and share the 100 most popular files on BitTorrent and turn these bits and pieces into a piece of art. The machine in question belongs to artist Nicolas Maigret and his Pirate Cinema project. Pirate Cinema has been on display for nearly two years in various venues, but this week the circle was completed when the piracy composition made its online debut. TF caught up with Maigret to learn more about the background and purpose of Pirate Cinema. He tells us that after completing several projects where the proposal was to represent networks in a physical form, he wanted to visualize how they’re used by millions of people around the world.