The Pirate Cinema Is Just Endless Torrenting And I Can’t Stop Watching

The Pirate Cinema Is Just Endless Torrenting And I Can’t Stop Watching

The Pirate Cinema turns worldwide torrent traffic into art. The results are equally beautiful, chaotic, inspiring, maddening, and there’s a slight chance that I can feel my brain melting.

This collage of crazy is an art installation, created by Nicolas Maigret, who wanted to recreate visually what “torrenting” really looked like. The video itself is a collage of quick clips that fly across the screen and flash a partial IP address and location, before heading on to the next random video. TorrentFreak details some of the behind-the-scenes on how Maigret has access to the information:

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.

That “100 most popular files” part is probably why the whole this isn’t just a bunch of porn.

Maigret takes the information (unknown to users), torrents the most popular titles, and uses random short clips to represent how long it takes to transmit the data. The installation has been around for a few years, but just this week, Maigret posted the real-time feed online so you can watch endlessly and endlessly. Here’s a quick example of the visual chaos that we’re talking about

You can now watch The Pirate Cinema live here where you can also read more about the process. It actually does give you a pretty good idea on what’s the most popular stuff being torrented around the world (right now a lot of Hobbit and Games of Thrones). Enjoy! [TorrentFreak]

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