Performance
The Pirate Cinema and Citation City
with: People Like Us, Brendan Howell, Nicolas Maigret
A live network data performance by Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell. / World-premiere of new audiovisual collage performance by People Like Us.
The Pirate Cinema
The hidden activity and geography of real-time peer-to-peer file sharing via BitTorrent is revealed in The Pirate Cinema, a live performance by Nicolas Maigret and Brendan Howell. In their monitoring room, omnipresent telecommunications surveillance gains a global face, as the artists plunder the core of restless activity online, revealing how visual media is consumed and disseminated across the globe. Each act of this live work produces an arbitrary mash-up of the BitTorrent files being exchanged, in real time, in a specific media category, including music, audio books, movies, porn, documentaries, video games and more. These fragmentary contents in transit are browsed by the artist, transforming BitTorrent network users (unknown to them) into contributors to the audio-visual composition that is The Pirate Cinema.
Nicolas Maigret (Conception and live performance) & Brendan Howell (Software development and voice over)
The Pirate Cinema performance at transmediale 2015 is presented in parallel to a series of Pirate Cinema events commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices (uk), Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art (si) and Kunsthal Aarhus (dk).
www.thepiratecinema.com
www.aksioma.org/pirate.cinema
Citation City
A world premiere of the new audovisual performance of renowned collage artist People Like Us (Vicki Bennett). The project is a further development of the artist’s database approach to cinema, deconstructing cinematic clichés and representations into unique associative and playful narratives. Citation City sources, collage and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?
Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual performance is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time. By gathering and assembling such groups of similar yet unrelated, he revealed a hidden, magical encyclopaedia of affinities, a massive and labyrinthine architecture of a collective dream city. In the live performance a series of story lines (convolutes) sit side by side with a soundtrack sourced both from the movie content, as well as new sample compositions thematically related to the visual content.