Creating a point of contact
between two or more people, or sending a message,
regardless of the form or content, are actions of
great significance, as well as a basic human need.
The act of communication in its many forms has
long been the focus of many artists. One key
example was undoubtedly Mail Art. For the artists
involved, Mail Art was a fascinating opportunity
to create a genuine network of people, individuals
who got actively involved in the process of
sending letters, postcards and fanzines to each
other. In 1980, the artists Kit Galloway and
Sherrie Rabinowitz produced their famous Hole
in Space project that for three days
created a live video link between the Lincoln
Center in New York and the Broadway Store in Los
Angeles. The work was a kind of experiment that
observed how the opportunity for live
communication between people on opposite sides of
the United States could change the way in which
they interacted and give rise to entirely new ways
of communicating. In 1997 the duo of artists known
as MTAA created Simple Net Art Diagram,
a basic animated gif showing two stylized
computers connected by a cable with a flashing red
lightning bolt, with the caption "The art happens
here." The image highlights the centrality of the
communicative act for artists in the second half
of the '90s who were close to the artistic
practices of Net Art: the internet was an
opportunity to create interconnected networks of
computers and users all round the world.(1)
In this context, peer- to-peer networks began to
enjoy increasing popularity, enabling users to
make available and share all kinds of files and
content with others. These communication tools
enabled people to create networks to exchange not
only messages and information but also different
types of materials.
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MTAA's Simple Net Art
Diagram.gif
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This scenario clearly shows how
both the communicative act itself - creating
connections among multiple individuals - and the
act of sharing materials of different kinds, is
not a neutral act, but one charged with meaning.
On closer inspection, exchanging
data on peer-to-peer networks is not even neutral
from a purely technical point of view: the act of
sharing and sending files actually temporarily
modifies and rearranges the files themselves. This
system of sharing breaks the files down into tiny
fragments that, taken singly, would not mean
anything to the user: tiny packets of information
that are sent to the receiver in entirely random
order. Only once the whole file has been
transferred are the packets reassembled in their
initial order, making the file accessible and
readable.
This transition from one point
to another in a channel of communication is the
focus of The Pirate Cinema, a work by
the French artist Nicolas Maigret.
The project, which he started in 2012, has taken
different forms: initially an installation, it was
later presented as a live performance, then an
online version was created. The exhibition in the
online gallery Link Cabinet(2)
in March 2015 featured yet another version of the
project, based on the famous legal dispute between
Metallica and Napster in the early 2000s. It was
the first time that artists had sued a company
supplying software for peer-to-peer file sharing,
and the ensuing court case led to the closure of
Napster. The artist's project inspired by this
takes the form of streaming audio based on the
live monitoring of Metallica albums being shared
online.
The Pirate Cinema is a
real-time streaming of files being swapped on the
peer-to-peer system BitTorrent, and the result
could be described as a generative portrait of
data sharing dynamics in this kind of user
network. The work visualises the technical
dynamics of data exchanges, manifesting a
mechanism that is not normally visible to the
common user. The Pirate Cinema focuses
in particular on the exchange of video files,
monitors the activity of BitTorrent users and
identifies the hundred most shared files, showing
the few seconds of video that correspond to each
data packet sent. The clips appear in the same
order in which they are transmitted on BitTorrent,
therefore completely at random.(3)
What we are shown by Maigret radically compromises
the integrity of the individual files, making it
impossible to follow plots, stories or narratives
of any kind: by embracing the peer-to- peer
system's random transmission mode, the individual
files are not only broken up, but also mashed
together with fragments of all the other files
that the system is monitoring at that time. In a
lecture at Aksioma Project Space, Geoff Cox(4)
described The Pirate Cinema as
real-time monitoring in video form of the life of
the network, and a representation of the
complexity and temporal stratification which
characterises the modern world and the many ways
of being live and in time.
The result is an offbeat live stream with marked
and inevitable echoes of the glitch aesthetic,
that is extremely effective in both conceptual and
visual terms: a clear, immediately comprehensible
rendering of a technical process that would be
much more difficult to explain in words.
The Pirate Cinema is a
continuous stream of images, sounds, data,
information, but also fragments of stories and
narratives, a mishmash of arthouse, b-movie and
porn scenes, a flood of crazed graphics and
pixels. This relentless river of content generates
two contrasting visions of the flow concept. On
the one hand, there is the idea of flow as a
constant stream – or rather, streaming - namely
the transmission of live data from a provider, in
this case one of the users sharing materials on a
peer-to-peer network, to other users wishing to
obtain and view the contents. Maigret's work shows
how this large mass of content continues to flow
steadily across the ether and enables us to
observe it in progress; to sit back and enjoy the
endless, ever-changing sequence of material on the
screen. Yet this notion of an ongoing stream is
opposed by the fragmentation of the individual
files: the flow is continually being interrupted,
truncated. Be they films, tv series or simply
music tracks, each file is originally structured
according to its own logic, with its own internal
order, which may be more or less fixed, sequential
and narrative to varying degrees, but is
nonetheless an order decided and imposed by its
creator.
What The Pirate Cinema shows
is a deconstruction - albeit temporary - of the
content shared by the users that, as we have said,
reflects the workings of peer-to-peer file sharing
systems. Yet it does more than simply dismantle
the source material: it generates new
possibilities, giving rise to something novel and
different. The flow generated by Maigret is not
simply a collage of small fragments of audio and
video files, but new content with a meaning of its
own, independent of the source material.(5)
This can be seen as a tribute to copy culture and
the practice of remixing in general, that the
artist has a personal connection with, and that
has played a key role in shaping digital cultures
over the last thirty years.(6)
There is something fascinating
and mesmerizing about the relentless flow
generated by the software programme, which gets
almost hypnotic over time: something to do with a
mixture of curiosity, the awareness of watching a
show that never ends, and that is ever-changing
and constantly new and different, and our unspoken
attempts to identify meaningful patterns that
would create some kind of relationship between the
clips. Absorbed in the huge amount of material
that scrolls rapidly before us, it is easy to
understand how Maigret's work can be viewed as a
metaphor for the modern-day relationship between
the user and the huge mass of data that is
constantly available online. The way we access
information online is becoming increasingly
convulsive, rapid and fragmented: we hop from one
piece of content to the next, switching back and
forth between a slew of open browser pages that
present a variety of different contents; we keep
several social media conversations on the go at
once, chatting to friends or colleagues, and
making plans for the weekend while we discuss
important work-related issues. We skip from gossip
sites to articles on scientific trivia or the
latest technological gizmo while we are trying to
finish a job that is already past its deadline. In
exactly the same way, The Pirate Cinema lets
us spend a few seconds watching one scene before
jumping immediately to the next, creating a random
path that continues ad infinitum and is impossible
to trace.
While the project creates a
generative portrait that aims to paint an
impartial picture of a given technology, it is
interesting to note how our attitudes, as humans,
and the ways we use technology, are now
increasingly resembling the operative dynamics of
these very tools. It is a process in which the two
parties, man and machine, inevitably influence one
another, and where it is impossible and perhaps
not even that interesting to try and pinpoint
exactly who is exerting an influence on who, in
what is basically a chicken and egg situation. Yet
it is undeniably fascinating to consider how these
two worlds - that we continue to view as separate
or even opposing - are drawing ever closer and
influencing one another more and more.
However while it is difficult to
identify logical, intrinsically coherent patterns
in our online movements, habits, visits and
readings, this does not mean that we are not
leaving a trace. Quite the opposite. Our movements
leave tracks that we are unlikely to be able to
conceal or delete. Once again, Maigret's work
makes an interesting point, highlighting how it is
possible to trace exact data and information
regarding the individuals who use the file sharing
systems in question. In addition to the streaming
video, the work contains elements that we might
tend to overlook or underestimate at first glance,
when we are immersed in the whirlwind of images on
the screen. The sequence of digits, alphanumeric
codes and titles that are superimposed on the
streamed images are in actual fact a series of
extremely precise data regarding the files being
shown, such as the name of the file and the
torrent it is associated with, but above all the
IP addresses and geographical origins of the users
who are doing the sharing.(7)
At this point The Pirate Cinema
becomes, to all intents and purposes, a collective
performance with a double layer of unawareness. On
one level there is the unwitting participation of
the BitTorrent users who end up in the area being
monitoring by the artist, while on another there
is the fact that they are not aware they are being
tracked by BitTorrent, and having their file
sharing activities publicly displayed by Maigret.
In the current social and political context,
characterised by hyper-control and
hyper-surveillance, Maigret's work reflects on the
vulnerability of systems we use on a daily basis,
yet without the due awareness.
The Pirate Cinema
could be seen as a literal interpretation of the
slogan "The art happens here" from Simple Net
Art Diagram, thus becoming a bona fide
work of Net Art; a work in which the artist seeks
to provide a snapshot of the complexity of the
present, identifying a topic and a setting - the
online activities we all carry out on a daily
basis - that is a starting point for broader
musings. The artist does not set out to provide
any answers, but has the merit of highlighting,
both directly and metaphorically, situations and
contradictions that affect all of us and the
social, political and economic setting we live in.
As if to say that to understand who we are, all we
need to do is look at the list of torrent files we
are sharing: just sit back and watch, and try to
catch our reflection in the screen.