D. Schmudde via nettime-l on Tue, 7 Jul 2026 19:02:31 +0200 (CEST)


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


Raising a few questions to better define the goal.
A large part of artistic practice consists of notes, sketches, prototypes, mistakes, attempts, and ongoing experiments. [...] 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'm not sure this is a problem. In my experience, the scraping reflects human interests. Are high-quality, unknown artists in Iowa being scraped? I don't know. In my experience, I don't have a big bot traffic problem with my irrelevant interests. I'm thankfully irrelevant. If the New York Times cited one of my domains then maybe I'd have an issue. So in absence or institutional support, this is probably not a target in practice. 


For this reason, I find the Small Web particularly compelling.


And so Small/Smol web seems particularly insulated in practice.
Before the bots, this problem already existed. A television station never wanted to pay for its archives. Then some documentarian would come in and make an interesting film using their footage. Suddenly, they had "intellectual property" that had to be guarded. This seems like a similar situation to working as a contemporary artist post-LLM. So what exactly are we trying to accomplish here? A licensing agreement? Or a fence? Or something novel? 

/David

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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure (Guido D'Apuzzo) 2. Re: Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio infrastructure 
      against AI scraping and platform enclosure (tatiweb)


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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2026 11:59:58 +0200
From: "Guido D'Apuzzo" <guidodapuzzo@gmail.com>
To: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets" 
	<nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio
	infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure
Message-ID:
	<CAFcj+OZFWKQ=Zf7cdg4eTVK_ndmzHsabckLceAam43Cv-ZQdTw@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
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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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2026 12:32:28 +0200
From: tatiweb <tati@tatiweb.org>
To: nettime-l@lists.nettime.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> Seeking alternatives: Artistic portfolio
	infrastructure against AI scraping and platform enclosure
Message-ID: <58781e69-753a-4ea1-8164-d0ec22fa00a6@tatiweb.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Hi, About that, there is this opensouce, federated application, been developed (very early dev at the moment) and one of the ideas is to have 
it as a plugin to the echbeach / pixelfed server. It is based on
https://are.na/ (makes possible to collect url/ text/ imgs/ etc for 
research) .

https://pond.st/posts/850

Actually the dev is looking for use cases for it ;)
https://matrix.to/#/#pondapp:matrix.org

On 7/6/26 11:59, Guido D'Apuzzo wrote:
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. 


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