A Fly Like Thee

A fly lands and walks across the screen. It is there because a bot has just crawled the page. »A Fly Like Thee«, a project by Olivier Jonvaux, is a plugin that brings these visits into view. Alongside it, a public live log names the bots behind them.

Olivier Jonvaux, Paris, France — Sep 17, 2026

A Fly Like Thee, France, 2026, © Olivier Jonvaux.

Every day, bots crawl ordinary websites (online shops, car garages, architecture firms, interactive platforms) and take everything they hold to feed AI models, without any consent or agreement. A Fly Like Thee is an open-source plugin that any website can install.

When a bot arrives (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), the plugin recognizes it by its signature and does two things at once. To people, it shows a trompe-l’œil fly landing on the page. To the bot, it writes a hidden quote inside the code itself, four lines by William Blake: »Am I not / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?« Serving one page to humans and another to machines is a search-ranking technique known as »cloaking,« here turned against its usual purpose.

The more a page is crawled, the more flies gather on it. A page the bots ignore stays clean; a page they return to fills with flies. They cannot be shooed away, they come back, and they only tell the truth: Something is feeding here. Blake’s four lines, meant only for the machine, count it among the living.

During the residency, Jonvaux will build and deploy the plugin, and launch a page hosted by Akademie Schloss Solitude keeping a public live log of every visit: which bot, which site, at what time. What is usually taken quietly now has a face and a name.

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