I See Faces : popular pareidolia and the proliferation of meaning

This chapter discusses the curious facial recognition performed upon everyday things and places - currently so popular on the internet – when faces are read into cheese graters, parking meters, coat hooks and the like. The phenomenon of pareidolia occurs because the human visual system has a tendency to extract patterns from noise, thus perceiving ‘meaning’ in random source material. The chapter uses this current fascination as the occasion to think about our desire to read meaning and significance into things. As an artist/scholar working with the everyday, rather than attempting to pin down definitive interpretations, I am interested in enlarging what can be generated from the ordinary objects and materials that surround us. Keywords: pareidolia; the everyday; artistic research; pattern; constellation