Generative AI companies rely on datasets that contain billions of photographs collected from across the internet. These photographs are of people—perhaps of you, or I, or people we love—many of whom will never know that their likenesses are included in these datasets and being used to generate images, videos, or filters for selfies. Confronting the vast scale of big data, beck baberstroh’s workshop We are already gathered models alternative ways of counting, congregating, and identifying one another.

Engaging the formats of masquerade, open-ended group brainstorm, and social contract, this workshop aims to transform data back into lived relationships and explore what happens when we reclaim these alienated representations of ourselves. Impossibly, it attempts to heal and reconfigure our relationship to our corresponding data, virtual communities, agency, and sense of trust.

We are already gathered is rooted in the following principles for facial belonging. If these terms and conditions cannot be met, then haberstroh holds that the dataset should not exist. Everyone whose image is contained within a dataset will:

• know of and consent to their presence in the dataset.

• know of and consent to the uses of the dataset.

• be invited to participate in conversations around the use of the dataset.

• be invited to meet and form community with the others whose images are contained within the dataset.

• be invited to visit the facilities where their image is stored.

• be given an estimate of the environmental costs of the long-term storage of their image and asked to consent to this.

• be given a report on the working conditions of human laborers interacting with their image and asked to consent to this.

• be contacted by researchers using their image to discuss the emotional, social, technical, and historical implications of the presence of their image within the dataset.

• be credited and compensated for the use of their image.

• be given agency to rescind their consent to any of the above at any time.

We are already gathered is presented by Parent Company as part of Body Double, a series of events that explores presence, virtuality, and transference through works by artists Xavier Cha, Tyler Coburn, beck haberstroh, and Ian Hatcher. This project is organized by Nicole Kaack in partnership with Dunes (Portland, ME), Miriam (Brooklyn, NY), and Parent Company (Brooklyn, NY).

beck haberstroh is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator. In 2022, they presented a public artwork in the City of San Diego’s Park Social Initiative with collaborator Katie Giritlian and co-authored the book Camera of Possibilities: A Workbook for a Carrier Bag Theory of Photography (Brooklyn, NY: Paper Cameras Press) with Mira Dayal. They have participated in residencies and fellowships at SOMA, Mexico City (2022); BRIC, Brooklyn (2019); and Outpost Artist Resources, Queens (2018). Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues, including the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego; Small Editions, Brooklyn; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Babycastles, New York; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn; Flux Factory, Queens; California State University Long Beach, Long Beach; and the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY. haberstroh holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. rhaberstroh.com

Contributions from: Abigail Cain, Bethany Tabor, Bryné Hadnott, Elena Gomez, Jinx Duncan, K.J. Rasmussen, Laura Hindmarsh, Matt Domino, MAVICA, Megan Jenkins, Memo Akten, Natalia Garcez, Noah Lawrence-Holder, Phuong T. Vuong, Piotr Nekama NeoFung, rae richards, Ruby Lott-Lavigna, Samantha Chavez, Sara Shaarawi, 10ju Sato, Viv Li, Yvette Ramírez, Zach Eliason