Benna Gaean Maris’s Hic Svnt Dracones (2023) is a code file implementing robot.txt blocks which are protected under the Robots Exclusion Protocol. The piece of code is a stark documentation of blocking access to her website from mainstream search engines, AI bots, and web crawlers. By preventing search engines from indexing her content, Maris pries at the intersection of surveillance and data-mining, prodding viewers to acknowledge how willingly we’ve integrated these technologies into our lives.
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The robots.txt file as of 2024-03-14:
# THIS TEXT FILE IS A CONCEPTUAL ARTWORK ENTITLED "HIC SVNT DRACONES" CONCEIVED BY BENNA GAEAN MARIS IN 2023
# HERE BE FINE PEOPLE
User-agent: *
Disallow:
# HERE BE BROWN NOSERS
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: GoogleOther
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-InspectionTool
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Video
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: /
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Disallow: /
User-agent: AdsBot-Google-Mobile
Disallow: /
User-agent: AdsBot-Google-Mobile-Apps
Disallow: /
# HERE BE MORONS
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /
User-agent: BingPreview
Disallow: /
User-agent: AdIdxBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: facebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: FacebookBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /
User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Applebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /
User-agent: amazon-kendra
Disallow: /
User-agent: AmazonAdBot
Disallow: /
#HERE BE DRAGONS
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: anthropic-ai
Disallow: /
User-agent: Omgilibot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Omgili
Disallow: /
User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider-news
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider-favo
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider-ads
Disallow: /
User-agent: Baiduspider-cpro
Disallow: /Homepage | Original robots.txt file
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“More than a web-site server configuration robots.txt (1) file with (voluntarily complied) rules for web crawlers, HIC SVNT DRACONES is a strong commentary on the artist’s opinion about certain companies.”
(1) From Wikipedia: “robots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.”
With this configuration file, the artist decided to block several mainstream search engines and social networks web crawlers and A.I. bots from indexing the web-site.
What Gougle says about this ban:
“The page owner prohibited G**gle from reading the page, which prevents us from creating a page description. Unfortunately there’s nothing that G**gle can do about this. If you know the site owners, tell them about it, and send them a link to this page.”
METATAGS
#dataharvesting #webcrawler #bot #searchengine #bigdata
Digital America interviewed Benna Gaean Maris in April of 2024.
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Check out Benna Gaean Maris’ past work, Marketing Keeled Free Web Like A Storm, with Digital America in Issue 22.
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Benna Gaean Maris is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works in photography, video, and digital graphics. She explores the potentials of poor materials and minimalism and how they can relate to and play off of metaphysical, human, social, and environmental issues. Maris’s work invites the viewer to question what it means to be a terrestrial earth dweller.
