By Thora Thøgersen

Eyebrows, yes. Big nose, yes. Short hair, yes. Result 65% man. Rosy cheeks, yes. Heavy makeup, yes. Slim chin, yes. It must be 100% woman.

These are the results of an Artificial Intelligence when looking to categorise gender in images — stereotypes that human eyes might not judge that swiftly. Soon data will not merely be aggregated from user searches and clicks online, but from our biometric data. Your face features and expression, your movement, the clothes you wear, and what you engage with on your way together with online tags, words, and names are puzzled together by an AI to paint a picture of who you are.

In We birth you, you birthed me, Thora Thøgersen unpacks multiple years of curated digital data identifications from social media as well as her personal image archives spanning this period to map out — with human eyes and hands — the multitudes of her personhood as an alternative to algorithmic categorisation.

When going through all my online data I couldn't recognize myself. even though I was the one that had posted all those pictures and googled those things of interest. For many years all the commercials AI's served me were odd and miss fitting. Occasionally there would be a shaving ad addressed to me because I have told Facebook that I identified as female. But then again I also got male shaving commercials. When looking at my "interest", the boxes Facebook had put me into, varied from liking 'Mondays', 'Blue skies', The city Łódź in Poland, and The Washington Post. None of them are of particular interest to me. Most common were cute animal videos and Wish commercials.

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I collected the data from my account onFacebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google, Tweeter and Danish Health databank. I tried to sort it into categories of use for me. Mostly I used pictures from Instagram and Facebook. Also, my "interest" on Pinterest and Facebook had relevance. I have from the beginning had things like location switched off and have over many rounds cleaned up in my old content.