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Hey, I'm Nicholas Margaret, his
friend in the world, and we are both
artists and programmer who will present
the Pirates in the Map project.
So basically the boats in the night, the
computer program that
is intercepting
the peer-to-peer flow on the BitTorrent
networks.
Um,
it's it makes the inner workings
of the BitTorrent protocol visible,
and it shows the of a growing
digital screens.
It's also a kind of tribute to,
let's say, the first year in culture.
It offered a real physical experience
of the information flows and
shape the ongoing political activity of
the readymade audiovisual composition.
So we can show you a
quick presentation.
Right.
They don't.
One.
And.
In fact,
the day last.
Earlier you.
I love your work.
Oh.
And should.
They
are so
now this.
This.
I mean.
She wants
to.
And.
You.
You
know.
How long did you?
Began
and she had to.
We.
Now
you're
to to.
There's a lot of.
I
hope.
Ow, ow,
ow, ow, ow, ow,
ow, ow, ow.
And.
But
it was.
A lot of.
So we'll explain a bit the technique, but
first, we wanted to introduce
the context, more global context
from a multistory perspective.
Um, this kind of approach
already existed like, let's
say, within the historical at the
vanguard.
Um, the question could be
how can we create and show the world
through the language and the technology
of our time?
And it's something that the discovery
of already states in
is kind of a manifesto in
1923.
Maybe you can read it,
OK?
You want me to read that, OK?
I am machine, I'm showing you a world.
The likes of which only I can see
I free myself for today and forever
from human immobility.
This is AI, the machine movement
maneuvering in the chaotic movements,
recording one movement after another
in the most complex combinations
freed from the boundaries of time and
space. I coordinate any and
all points of the universe wherever
I want them to be.
My way leads towards the creation
of a fresh perception of the world.
Thus, I explain in a new way
the world unknown to you.
So at this time, you was talking about
the camera,
but it's something we can extrapolate
quite easily to contemporary
technology,
and it's also a approach
that has been developed
in other stories to be later.
Like with the cut up,
the latter is the Mash-Up.
We can show more example and details.
So, for instance,
in the field of
musical cut up,
um, a very interesting
example is with music
in the 60s that was
actually, uh, cutting and pasting
pieces of vinyl.
So he was constructing a composition.
But from actually breaking
the support to the medium,
the musical medium and making
a new object and the potential
song composition all of its
later journals.
While it was doing
a little more musical
version of this with
cutting and pasting symbols
and pieces of cassettes,
cities and doing
actual songs and all of it of all of
these methods.
The other aspect, which is even more
related to this project, is the question
of working with the live
interceptions.
For instance, John Cage
in his Um,
I'm sorry.
Um, for
instance, John Cage in a variation.
Seven.
Um was using
TV radios, and J.J.
raconteur and the performer
were free to switch on and off
this livestreams.
More recently, Robin Rambo,
also known as the scanner,
was doing a interceptions of
phone calls and
use it to make concerts
in the records and so on.
From maybe more technical to our
perspective, the pirates
in them, yeah, also refers
to larger
major media
culture changes that happened after
World War Two.
Um, the first example with
will be with the Xerox technique
from the 60s, where it allows to
reproduce the or books,
images and other copyrighted
documents.
Um, then
the same kind of example in the music
will be the tapes where
it allows people to record, archive
and duplicate existing copyrighted
material
in a little closer to
over context here.
Uh, the crack scene
was quite important in that field.
Um, especially for the
software and game industry where
it allows the copyrighted material to
spread using this
um and later
the network
and for a larger audience.
Um, the
the file-sharing uh, over peer-to-peer.
So with a technique like
Napster, immune deterrence
allows people to, uh, share and
exchange, uh, a large,
uh, categories
of, uh, content, images,
uh, movies,
PDFs, ebooks and
so on.
So this project is somehow
a tribute to this kind
of shift in content distribution.
Um, from the Tribune's perspective,
this project. Proposed ambiguous
insights into peer-to-peer activity.
It clearly refers to control
and surveillance topics.
Um, the pirates
in the proposal were to somehow
sit at the crossroads
of users activity
and it's, um,
remind. It remains that somehow
the panopticon where the concept was
to allow a single watzman
to observe all inmates
of an institution
and the pirates in then also silently
revealed the content of peer-to-peer
file sharing. So Brendan will maybe
continue and
explain, um,
the the way it, uh,
refers to the black chamber.
Mm hmm.
So here's um.
So on the left, you can see, uh,
Louie, the 15th and then on
the right there's, uh, Fort Meade in
Maryland.
And in a way, you could say
that Louie, the 15th, had his own Fort
Meade, and it was called the Cabinet
Noir, which was the black chamber
where they would open the letters
of, uh, you know, if somebody was somehow
a suspect or if they thought, maybe
this guy is hanging around with the wrong
crowd. They wanted to know who it was.
So they would they had these various
pretty advanced for that time techniques
of opening sealed
letters and, uh,
copying down what was written and then
resealing them and sending them on so
that the recipient wouldn't know that
somebody was looking at their post.
So this is one thing that, yeah, I guess
everyone's pretty aware of now
in the last year, and I suppose everyone
in this room has probably been aware of
it for longer than that.
Um, so it's one thing
that in some ways has kind of
ruined the party for BitTorrent because
you have what
is a very democratic principle that
everyone participates
equally on the network.
But it means that you have to
essentially publish your IP address in
order to participate in the swarm.
So certain media
companies and their henchmen
have caught on to this, and
they've developed these copyright alert
systems. So you have one called Mark
Monitor, which basically adjoins
BitTorrent networks and
starts collecting IP addresses and
then matching those up to
databases with ISPs.
And then they send nasty letters to the
ISPs and try to
then use whatever it, depending
on which jurisdiction you're in and
hit people with various different civil
or illegal.
Consequences
so the person may use the same
security weakness, let's say,
and the transparency
of most people's IP addresses
and the transparency of the GENC
request on the BitTorrent protocol.
OK, so we thought
maybe we could make this
this process more transparent
and figure out how we could
essentially watch movies
from the perspective of the computer.
And so we built a sort
of copyright surveillance machine,
essentially each.
Here you see three of them there little
Mac Minis running Linux plugged
into video projectors,
and they're then plugged
into a router connected to a standard
DSL link.
And each of the Linux servers runs
a custom torrent software.
And in order to cover
our own asses, as well as that
of the gallerists and people
who wanted to actually exhibit the work,
we decided to use VPN.
In this case, it was a predator.
Although now that we have
a hard time paying for it, so we switch
to another one. But initially
that was the idea, and it was also
consistent because we were sourcing
our lists of media.
Basically, it was going down The Pirate
Bay's top 100 lists
of most popular torrents.
So basically, each computer would,
uh, download every day
the top 100 list of
the most shared videos,
and each of them would become
a torrent server and client,
and it will display the Cheng's
request as the as the go.
And just in case anyone
isn't totally familiar with the
BitTorrent protocol, I know a lot
of people here probably aren't,
but that when you
join a swarm to download a particular
file, you get
sort of an arbitrary list of chunks
of the file so you don't get it in.
You don't start downloading from the
first frame and go through to the end of
the movie. You're getting things in an
arbitrary order.
And if you join multiple
forms, then it's going to be interleave.
So that's why you're seeing
what you're seeing on the screen is
actually exactly what's coming
down the network pipe as close
as possible as we can get to that.
So maybe I'll show
a little. This is somewhat simplified,
but hopefully it's understandable.
So we have our individual Linux PCs,
they're essentially independent
from another and
they've got a list of the top 100
files or torrents from the
Pirate Bay. And they sort of randomly
pick ones and they're downloading
somewhere between two and six
at a time.
And that's one process.
It's a bit of Python code
that's using
the BitTorrent library,
and it's essentially keeping
track of what's being downloaded and
where it's coming from and then also what
we're uploading and who were sending it
to.
And any time a chunk comes in, then
it sends a message using zero
and queue to another
process that the video player,
which is also written in Python
using GStreamer, which then
tries to playback this chunk
that we've just done to.
That's what you see coming out the
projection.
OK, and then the on screen
displays just an old school
is the and it's um
their input is, um,
just the translation of the IP address
using geo to IP.
So we basically for each
chunk, so the
uh, the peer we got it from.
And the peer we are sending it to.
OK.
OK, and so for us, this project
is not so much a scientific
hacking or design study,
we rather see it as an activator
of analogies.
Imagine a refill or a mental
representation.
And it's also a playground for
experiencing today audio and video
structures, testers or
observers.
And the technical aspect is the,
let's say, a mean of approach.
And here and then.
Yeah.
But I wanted to mention that in some
ways, it's kind of interesting.
I mean, maybe it's because we spent way
too much time looking at this stuff as we
were debugging it.
But Nico, I remember one day
we were on Skype talking
about this, and you mentioned that
in terms of sort of like, you know,
classic film analysis stuff.
You mentioned that in a way it was hard
to tell the difference between the music
video clips and the porn clips that
they had almost the same cinematography
and like sort of motion and
acting and stuff that was really weird.
And anyway, there's a bunch of these
things that sort of emerge from it that
are sometimes interesting
in terms of like a cultural analysis that
you normally wouldn't come to just by
watching TV or whatever
films in the conventional way.
The funny thing also is that there is
very small traffic coming from
Germany because because of
the legislation, which is quite hard
here. So when when you look
at the GEO two IP
address, where it's coming
from and where it goes to, there is
oddly no Germany
and the same for China
because they are using different
processes.
For instance, you can buy
a DVD ad
at the corner of the street for one
year or something.
So they are not using as much
as we do.
OK, so it seems to be time for
Q&A time.
Oh yeah.
OK.
Do we have more slides?
Mm hmm. OK.
That was an excellent.
We can do a longer Q&A.
OK, so we have some mikes for Q&A.
Just line up.
Also, if you're on the stream, this ISC
and Twitter, so
questions.
Internet any questions?
OK?
Well, that's
embarrassing.
OK, just go ahead.
That's Mike.
Hey, I saw that
on the on the screen.
Could you
please talk into the my sorry,
I assume the scream that the video was
very watchable, but how do
you manage the bandwidth problem
or do you regret the reason
to have enough churn to see something
but not enough to to flush
the user?
I think some of it is. We just got lucky
and that the standard chunk sizes
for torrent files
were although we did, actually, we did
have problems with that because we were
looking at pieces and chunks and chunks
are slightly larger.
So we decided that we would monitor
chunks because then
you had enough data that it wasn't just
one frame.
And also in terms of processing the
the IO, it
starts to just eat up here from CPU,
and you can't see anything visually
interesting.
But yeah, in some ways it's just a
coincidence that it worked out that way.
So usually a chunk is like a quarter
of a second or something like this, and
that's actually the the timescale
that you can see in the video.
Hello.
Did you did you try to create it by
content, so let's say only
black and white movies or movie noir,
or maybe just like where you set your
phone out like that video clips and porn
is almost the same, just like
put more content together and not going
for the top 100, but making like
more one piece out of many,
which goes into the same direction.
So the
shot with the video presentation you were
just so um is
a, let's say, the installation version,
which is just going by itself.
Um, but um, we
also worked on a
concert version audiovisual constitution
where it would be the
the idea. So exactly what
you are talking about to drive a
little more the the focus
of the view in the time.
So the this
concert, um, will be treated
in, uh, different parts, and each
part will be a focus on a
different aspect of the peer-to-peer
sharing activity.
So let's say one part could focus on the
music sharing and another part could be,
uh, about ebooks that are
about maybe totally obscure
documents or stuff like this.
OK, thanks.
Um, there's a question
in there. I see what the future
of peer-to-peer file exchange,
new view based, you
know, net based,
uh.
Could you repeat that for sure?
What does the future of peer-to-peer
file exchange?
Oh, I don't know if,
for example, a new the new
net based tool?
Yeah.
Um, so actually
the the history of, uh,
BitTorrent, a peer to peer exchanges,
uh, uh, reaching
its end because, um,
this a weakness, for instance, in the
insecurity that we are using is,
uh, quite a big issue because it's,
uh, the actual, uh,
inputs that are using, uh,
the uh, the company to, uh,
uh, to have a lawsuit over a
person. Um, so
the technology
has to change.
Um, also the documents
are developing right now.
So, uh, there are a lot of um,
ways to exchange files,
um, outside, uh, classical
BitTorrent, uh, uh,
system, uh, for instance, which
was which was shares.
Even we can go back to the old
F2P systems and so on.
But uh, the actual way that peer-to-peer
works, uh, as, uh,
some issue right now.
So I think it's hard to predict.
Yeah, that's OK.
Go ahead.
How did the people react
to
the installation, did you receive
any feedback from the public?
So it really depends where you show it.
Um, for instance, um,
where the wind installation was shown
in Montreal.
Um, the organizers
were super open for the project
and they were like, OK, and you could
even the person and put
whatever you want.
It has to be like, What do you radical?
And everything has to be included
in the project.
And for instance, um,
the the other time I presented
the project, it was never possible
to show any form.
So we were just filtering
by categories and listening to on the
other categories.
Another interesting example is the
the time when I showed it in, uh,
in China, the reaction of
people was super interesting
because for them, the
the first said the what mean pirate
is like what?
It is being a pirate too, to just
share a photo to just download the file.
What does it mean in
the I mean, just the base
of the project or the base of the
terminology of the project is already
something with
UM.
And for them, they didn't exactly
get the point because, uh,
I mean, you can share and download
things whenever you want the
the equivalent of Google in China.
Um,
you can. From the start page, you can
type, uh, a song or
a movie or a book, and
you can have the actual link to just
download it.
So,
I mean, it's totally outside of the
um of the logic when you show
it there.
I think we have time for one last
question.
Yeah, another question from the IOC.
Um, why didn't they
anonymize the IP addresses?
So actually,
it's something that more and more users
are doing.
Brendan explained that in the project,
we are using a VPN.
So this choice,
we made it, um, just because when
we show it, the specific places we didn't
wanted the IP
of the of the
gallery or something to be
overexposed 24 hours
a day with the 100 top,
most selfies.
But that's actually what's more and more
users are doing.
Um, so that's a we're
using a VPN for all of
your connections.
Um, yeah, I think that
so a lot of users are doing it.
Um, I think the question was more whether
why do you not
anonymize the IP addresses of the other
people like those that
you showed?
Oh, um,
so you know,
when
actually those IP are
totally transparent?
Um, whenever
you launch a BitTorrent
clients, you just choose
any file and you will see the 20
or 100 IP you are connected with.
So that's I mean, that's part of the
system. It's a totally transparent
all the time.
Um, we are just showing
parts of it, but uh, it's you
know, um, already
available.
Yeah. I mean, assuming that the police
weren't going to come to our
gallery show and start writing
down IP addresses for the state.
Thanks.
OK, please thank our speakers, Nicholas
and Brandon.