Web Residencies »Ignore All Previous Instructions«

We received an overwhelming number of 398 applications from around the world in response to the Web Residencies Open Call »Ignore All Previous Instructions,« from which we were able to select only six. The number of application speaks to the urgency of the questions the call raised, and the need to find ways to break or hijack the logics that techno-fascists are inscribing into their tools.

We were particularly drawn to proposals that took the call’s premise as an invitation to act. »Ignore all previous instructions« describes a very specific intervention into an AI system, but it also opens up a broader question around instructions themselves: the protocols, standards, interfaces, classifications, and behavioral patterns that organize digital environments. Many applications approached these structures as artistic material and explored what becomes possible when their intended use is disturbed.

The proposals responded with a wide repertoire of strategies. Opacity, illegibility, encryption, noise, misdirection, multiplication, camouflage, obsolescence, and disappearance appeared repeatedly. Some approaches interfered directly with machine readability; others explored forms of communication whose meaning depends on context, embodiment, shared knowledge, or human interpretation.

Across the applications, we encountered websites designed to become unreadable to AI scrapers, traps for web crawlers; browser extensions imagined as spells, adversarial playgrounds for experimenting with AI systems, distributed archives running on obsolete or discarded devices and solar power, and poetic interventions into the infrastructure of hyperlinks.

We were interested in projects that moved between technical specificity and broader political questions without reducing one to the other.

Taken together, the selected projects respond to »Ignore All Previous Instructions« by refusing the position of the compliant user. They interfere with systems from within, introduce ambiguity where machines demand legibility, and create sociality where platforms anticipate transactions.

automatonomy.net – What You See Is Not What They Get
The project develops an open-source method that scrambles website text for AI scrapers while keeping it visually legible to human visitors through a custom font. It responds directly to the call by exploiting the gap between human and machine perception to interrupt automated data extraction from within the web’s infrastructure.

Lucia Rebolino – www: vanity veils violence
The project maps the political, colonial, economic, and environmental realities hidden behind commercially desirable country-code domains such as .ai, .io, and .tv. It fits the call by counter-mapping an apparently neutral layer of internet infrastructure, revealing the uneven geographies and power relations concealed by the web’s dominant systems.

Herdimas Anggara – RASUK, Poisoning My Own SEO
The project creates multiple websites based on misspellings of the artist’s name in order to confuse search engines and destabilize the authoritative identity produced by AI-generated summaries. It responds to the call through playful infrastructural misuse, deliberately introducing noise into systems designed to classify, consolidate, and make identities predictable.

Tara Kelton – Work Party
The project uses delivery apps to organize brief gatherings in which gig workers and customers share food, tea, and conversation within the time and logistical constraints of the platform. It fits the call by détournement: the mechanisms designed to minimize human contact and maximize efficiency are repurposed to create moments of communal exchange.

Précieux Kinmagbo – Terms & Conditions
The project creates an interactive encounter with the Lukasa memory board in which attempts to extract information are met with the Mbudye protocols of counter-questioning, riddling, and partial disclosure. It responds to the call by confronting AI’s demand for unrestricted legibility with a radically different protocol in which opacity, relation, and controlled access become forms of agency.

Olivier Jonvaux – A Fly Like Thee
The project develops an open-source website plugin that detects AI crawlers and makes their otherwise invisible visits visible to human users through flies accumulating on the webpage. It fits the call by turning the mechanisms of automated extraction against themselves, transforming an invisible infrastructural process into a simple and legible public signal.

Together, these six projects propose different ways of refusing the roles assigned to us by contemporary digital infrastructures. They scramble readability, counter-map hidden economies, poison search identities, transform transactions into gatherings, defend knowledge through protocols of partial disclosure, and give invisible bots visible bodies. Some operate through code, others through social choreography, cartography, humor, or cultural protocols. What connects them is a willingness to work inside existing systems without accepting their intended use.

At a moment when resistance itself is quickly captured, categorized, and turned back into content, these proposals introduce other rules for moving through systems. They make things illegible where legibility has become extraction, visible where extraction depends on invisibility, and social where platforms have engineered separation.

Out of almost 400 applications, choosing only six necessarily means leaving many strong proposals unselected. We would like to thank everyone who responded to the call and shared their work, research, experiments, and propositions with us. The extraordinary range of responses confirmed the urgency of the questions and, more importantly, showed how many different wrong maps are already being drawn.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik and Sarah Donderer (for SCOPE – Solitude Collaborative Platform for Art, Science & Digital Cultures)

RASUK, Poisoning My Own SEO is a web-based project that toys with Heheheheherdimas Anggara’s online identity through Google’s AI Overviews. It multiplies him into a small network of identities based on common misspellings of his name. Hehehehehe hehehehe hexes the search engine with Hermidas, Herrdimas, Herdinas, Angarra, and Anggarra, then waits to see who Google thinks hehehehehe is.

What You See Is Not What They Get is a project by automatonomy.net focusing on practical research into defense mechanisms against AI data scraping and agents. Rather than relying on preventing access or obfuscating the provided data, the approach suggests exploiting the difference between machine reading and human visual perception, while adding inclusive elements to it. The developed Python tool encrypts the context of text elements by playing with font shapes, order, or layers, making it illegible to machines, but still legible to humans.

A Fly Like Thee is an open-source project by artist Olivier Jonvaux that exposes what usually goes unseen: the bots that crawl websites for AI models. The project leaves a hidden message for the machines and a visible swarm of flies for the people, placing the bot among the living things it feeds on.

Work Party by Tara Kelton is a series of experimental, high-speed gatherings between gig workers and app users in Bangalore, produced using the delivery apps’ own mechanics: The food, party materials and guests all arrive by ordering on the platform. The project rejects the boundaries the platform sets between gig worker and app user, and asks whether meaningful exchange can happen at high speed.

Terms & Conditions is a web-based encounter with the Lukasa, a Luba wooden memory board historically legible only within the embodied, initiatory protocols of the Mbudye society. The project, by artist Mahoutondji Kinmagbo, treats the museum vitrine and the AI dataset as sharing one extraction logic across a century – a logic that becomes embodied in the interactive object and its platform. Publishing it as a desktop-only web piece, styled as ordinary AI model, the interactive Lukasa has an inherent defense mechanism, where genuine questions are met with authentic partial answers, while jailbreak attempts become a performance of the very thing they try to bypass.

www: vanity veils violence investigates the geopolitical weight and violence embedded in »vanity codes« such as .io, .tv or .ai. Artist, architect, and computational designer Lucia Rebolino is drawing on research on country-code domains to reveal the uneven digital distributions and colonial logics they produce and unfold. Forensic methodologies will be extended to the digital space to choreograph a living map of the spatial and environmental impacts embedded within computational domains.

Graphic design by Miriam Humm
Image 1: © Herdimas Anggara, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
Image 2: © automatonomy, Photo: CC BY-NC-SA
Image 3: © Olivier Jonvaux, Photo: Eugenia Raït
Image 4: © Tara Kelton
Image 5: © Portrait Tondji, Photo: Azgard Itambo
Image 6: © Lucia Rebolino, Photo: Chiara Rebolino