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Entertainment

Mad Men: The Accidental Glitch Art Edition

An incomplete bittorrent file is a great place to find some corrupted beauty.

Once upon a time a corrupted file was a corrupted file, an annoyance that was a punishment for your illegal download of a TV show that you should have waited for the DVD boxset and paid for. All that time spent waiting, anticipating, only to have nothing to show for it but an unwatchable video. But, one person’s corrupted file is another’s glitch art and so a corrupted, incomplete version of the Mad Men episode The Summer Man becomes a sign of the times or “found glitch art”, if you will.

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Vimeo user Conor McGarrigle who uploaded the video explains:

Video comprising one episode of Mad Men incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent. The video has been linearly edited, no digital effects were used and all jump cuts and repeats are in the corrupted file.

The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. 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.

So, is a broken bittorrent file worth a watch? Well, yeah. Like some of the commentators say, it has a strange, captivating beauty.

[via Metafilter]

@stewart23rd