Pirate Music Box is a series of interactive installation art that gathers dynamic information about the Bittorrent network to convey the artist opinion about how the creative content industry has been changed. There are four installations in the series. Each piece in the series is an interactive mosaic that has two sides. The fist side is black and white mosaic of well-known logos from music labels visual, book publisher logos, and film studio logos. The second side is a colored mosaic of popular Bittorrent clients. When every torrent user downloads contents from Bittorent network, a black and white logo randomly flips into a colored Bittorrent client logo. Each piece of Pirate Music Box has an interface with a play button and a play head. When the user press play button, the play head on the interface starts to play. The play head triggers a sound every time it hits a torrent client logo. Once the play head reaches the right end of mosaic, the mosaic refreshes all the tiles. Therefore, Pirate Music Box dynamically changes its appearance every time it plays. Although each installation shares the same technique, every piece covers a different category of pirated contents.

Combining four different contexts but using the same style, Pirate Music Box constructs a big picture of the current piracy situation in creative content industry to makes a statement. The first and second pieces, “Let it be” and “I Shot The Sheriff” display the effect of Bittorent networking on music industry; the third piece is “The Boy Who Lives” articulating the piracy in book and publishing industry; the last piece is titled “The Sinking Boat” implying illegal movie download. Through paradoxical concepts, conflicted symbols, and puns, Pirate Music Box series shows that while music, books, and movies are the same, the traditional ways of content distribution is being replaced by digital file sharing.

The most important element in Pirate Music Box series is the paradoxical concept, which is how the piece generates its visual and sound. Pirate Music Box captures information from people who are stealing arts to make artworks. For example, whenever a Bittorrent user starts to download any the Beatles’ album, Let It Be will flip one tile from a black and white music label logo into a Bittorrent client logo. When the user presses the play button, and the playhead runs over a Bittorrent logo, a sound will be triggered. This interactivity mimics Bittorrent logos as pins in a music box. Information about people who are stealing music and other contents is ironically creating another piece of music. In addition, each installation’s Bittorrent logo tiles use sampling of sound related to the visual representation. “Let It Be” uses samplings from the Beatles music; “I Shot The Sheriff” uses Bob Marley Music sampling; “The Boy Who Lives” uses Harry Potter audio book sound; “The Sinking Boat” samples Titanic movie soundtrack. In other words, while stealing creative contents, Bittorrent users re-construct a new version of the contents in Pirate Music Box. Thus, the series creates paradoxical concept by playfully doing touché to the information pirates by taking their stealing activity to create the other creative contents.
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