notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Mad Men: Bittorrent Edition, by Conor McGarrigle (via, via):

the video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.

It also avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete.

There are some interesting reactions to this on a Metafilter thread. For example, here’s Malice (#):

I’m not so sure that’s the “bittorrent edition” so much as the “online streaming of pirated tv shows” edition.

I also just don’t get how this is lovely at all. It’s rather annoying. Why anyone would voluntarily watch that is beyond me, this is the sort of thing that happens on rainy days to satellite subscribers, or when Netflix is being shitty.

Greg Nog replies (#):

It’s very pretty! And the theme of damage and incompleteness being wreaked upon a background of superficial aesthetic appeal works really well for its source material. Coupled with the (also very pretty song), I found this to hold a compellingly melancholy kind of charm for me — far more so than the AMC show holds, in fact.

shakespeherian added (#)

I think you’re missing what the draw is here for some folks, myself included. One of the ways that art functions is to draw attention to the overlooked, to find weird little spaces in common experience that people tend to skip over impatiently when they’re looking for the Real Meat Of Life, and to say: What if we just look at this one little thing? What if, instead of skipping over it, we acknowledge its commonality, we indulge it in the things we recognize about it, we allow it to play out and examine what it has to offer? Is there anything it can reveal, any way its random parts can accidentally work in concert to make something interesting? This process that so many of us participate in— torrenting episodes of a glossy-looking teevee show— what alternative results can spring from that same activity, and what happens if we just look at those results as if that was what we were trying for?

Also in the thread, as Kevin Slavin noted, there’s a good description of how the effects emerge by Rhomboid.