Pareidolia, Me and the PANDEMIC.
With mask on, Spring beginning, I carefully ventured out of my house on foot into the world of the early days of the pandemic. I adapted quickly to recognizing friends and neighbor’s faces, their eyes peeping above masks. Face recognition technology was on my mind. My own face recognition skills mixed with my curiosity of detail started to force my attention to the creatures and faces that started to emerge from the trees’ bark and the emerging spring flora. I assigned my brain to search for these characters now appearing all around me. Some images have been augmented by playing with color saturation, desaturation, hue adjustment or hand coloring. I couldn’t help being reminded of the visual adventures LSD encouraged when I was a teenager.
But these photographs are also about the act of seeing. What draws us into a painting, a drawing, a photograph, a person’s face? How does one make sense of and what do you feel when you look at Curly of the Three Stooges’ face, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Jong Un, John Lennon?
pareidolia (noun)
The perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, (the man in the moon, the Shroud of Turin) in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines. “there could be a mysterious stone coffin on Mars, or, more likely, it’s just the latest example of pareidolia”
The psychological phenomenon that causes some people to see or hear a vague or random image or sound as something significant is known as pareidolia (par-i-DOH-lee-a).
