Created as part of the Canadian Sight and Sound festival by Nicholas Maigret and Brenden Howell, The Pirate Cinema is an installation that seeks to turn peer-to-peer file sharing into an artform.

The installation displays a fragmented compilation of conflicting clips over multiple screens, all taken from the most popular video files currently being shared worldwide. This effect is attained using specially designed software, that selects excerpts from the top hundred torrents being downloaded from the popular file sharing website, The Pirate Bay. The source and destination of the files is also visible, allowing viewers to witness the details of the usually hidden world of global file exchange in real time.

This ‘cinematic collage’ is intended to chart the geography of sharing activity, and much like the Map of the Internet, is another project seeking to create art from a concealed online world.