Mschf’s newest prank lets you watch pirated movies— but there’s a pretty big catch

I’m in a meeting with members of the art collective Mschf, when they drop a line of code into the chat. “Paste this into Terminal,” they instruct me. I kinda know these guys, and yet, I’ll admit to having a moment’s hesitation to give the internet’s most ferocious pranksters access to the command line of my Mac, the very heart of my computer.

But I do it anyway. And instantly—I mean instantly—I’m watching the Barbie movie. Yes, the Oscar-nominated (and snubbed) Barbie. For free. Legally? . . . Sure. Why? Because this isn’t some 4K Dolby Atmos feed. The footage is fully rendered in type. 

ASCII Theater is the latest project from Mschf, which turns Hollywood films into a stream of ASCII art streaming to your computer. (ASCII is a text-based computer language meant to marry the numeric thinking of computers with our 128 characters of written communication.) The service streams one movie a day through a strange, convoluted work-around—sending you 10 colorful text files a second that recreates a film entirely in words.

Each film is shown as a stream of letters, symbols, and numbers rendered in 256 colors. I’m trying to find a way to describe the aesthetic. It’s like a 1995 internet message board made over by Netflix. It renders iconic scenes completely recognizably, and yet, futilely if your plan is to *actually* watch the movie as a movie as a typical paying customer.

“There’s a long history of really creative solutions to pirate broadcasting on the internet . . . [like] there was a kid on Twitch who was streaming NBA games, and he would wear shiny sunglasses, watch the game, and if you zoomed in you could watch the game in his lenses,” says creative officer Kevin Wiesner. “There’s just a very satisfying joy of inventing a hack.”

Indeed, the project pokes at a lot of sensations we experience in modern digital life: the absurd, unavoidable level of trust we have when installing apps and copy and pasting code from websites, the complete lack of understanding most of us have about the machines that power most of our work and play, and the absolute lowest threshold for people to try to get around a paywall or find a pirate stream if it’s just a bit cheaper or easier to do.

For its The Free Movie, Mschf enlisted the internet to recreate every frame of the Bee Movie with a drawing. There’s something spiritually similar about ASCII Theater—an amusing experience of pirating a movie that’s meticulously technically executed but in the lowest resolution imaginable. The joke is on Hollywood, but as I squint to make out Ryan Gosling’s coded blue eyes, I suspect that this time, it’s also at least a little bit on me.