Nicolas Maigret

NICOLAS MAIGRET exposes the internal workings of media, through an exploration of their dysfunctions, limitations or failure thresholds which he develops sensory and immersive audio visual experiences. As a curator he initiated the Disnovation Research Group which conducts a series of deviant strategies and symbolic activities facing the ongoing propaganda of technological innovation. He teaches at Parsons Paris and co-founded the Art of Failure collective in 2006. With Maria Roszkowska he co-edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.

His work has been presented in international exhibitions and festivals: Transmediale (Berlin) – Museum of Art and Design (New York) – File (Sao Paulo) – 30th Chaos Communication Congress (Hamburg) – Palais de Tokyo (Paris) – Elektra (Montréal) – China Museum of Digital Arts (Beijing) – Polytechnic Museum (Moscow) – North-West Film Forum (Seattle) – School of the Art Institute (Chicago) – The Pirate Bay 10th Anniversary (Stockholm) – Eastern Bloc (Montreal)

Exhibiting and Presenting

The Pirate Cinema

Project Website

In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes the hidden activity and geography of peer-to-peer file sharing visible. The project is presented as a monitoring room, which shows peer-to-peer transfers happening in real time on networks using the BitTorrent protocol. The installation produces an arbitrary cut-up of the files currently being exchanged. This immediate and fragmentary rendering of digital activity, embedding information about its source and destination, thus depicts the topology of digital media consumption and uncontrolled content dissemination.

The Pirate Cinema is based on a data interception software. It reveals, through a simple diversion, different aspects of exchange platforms, such as the global and multi-situated nature of peer-to-peer networks (P2P), the potential for viral transmission, and alternative social models. Its purpose is to make available for aesthetic exploration the pre-existing potentials of Peer-to-Peer architectures.

This project transforms BitTorrent network users (unknown to them) into contributors to an endless audio-visual Exquisite Corpse.