Re: <nettime> Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure

[Guido D'Apuzzo via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Thank you for opening this discussion. I believe it raises an increasingly
important question.

I wonder whether one possible direction is not only to develop better tools
against scraping and AI training, but also to rethink the infrastructures
in which artistic research takes place. I am thinking, for example, of
small, low-cost personal servers managed directly by artists, existing at
the margins of the commercial web. Not as a definitive solution, but as an
attempt to recover a different relationship with digital space.

What concerns me is not simply the protection of finished artworks. What
concerns me even more is preserving the conditions that make artistic
research possible.

A large part of artistic practice consists of notes, sketches, prototypes,
mistakes, attempts, and ongoing experiments. These materials belong to a
process and should not necessarily be treated as finished works or as data
available for unrestricted reuse.

My concern is therefore not only that these materials may be automatically
scraped and repurposed for contexts entirely different from those in which
they were emerge. I also wonder whether we should defend the right of
research to remain unfinished, fragile, and situated.

Not everything that becomes accessible should immediately become raw
material for other systems. Perhaps we should preserve the possibility for
an idea to remain, at least for a while, a hypothesis, a doubt, or an
experiment, before being absorbed into infrastructures that tend to
transform every trace into data.

For this reason, I find the Small Web particularly compelling. I would be
very interested to hear about other decentralized networks, alternative
protocols, or low-tech infrastructures that could offer not only greater
technical autonomy, but also help preserve the conditions under which
artistic research can evolve at its own pace.

Thank you again for opening this discussion. I look forward to learning
from the perspectives and experiences shared by this community.
:) GD


Il lun 6 lug 2026, 09:57 tatiweb via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
ha scritto:

> I facilitate a pixelfed server for professional artists in the
> Netherlands echobeach.nl . At the moment people are duplicating their
> instagram profiles, but the sever is growing and getting feeds from
> other servers. My next step is to figure out how to add a AI defense on
> the server, to work when people upload their files to the server.
>
> On 7/2/26 23:20, Stella Aster via nettime-l wrote:
> > I would love a way to scrape Instagram profiles into a Pixelfed
> > instance, that would give me enough motivation to actually set up a
> > local art Pixelfed I think. But then again, maybe that is the young
> > technologist in me, always eager to solve problems with my keyboard,
> > when perhaps I should just start with some conversations, and be
> > relational about it.
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# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org