Not only Pareidolia // Munch’s the Scream

Text & Photo by Matteo Moretti, [Bolzano] // 09.08.2012

I state: I am not an anthropologist, a semiotician or a cognitive scientist, just a designer.
I teach Interactive & Motion Graphics at the Free University of Bozen Bolzano, I also work as web designer & motiongrapher, leading in the meantime my research on generative design.

Since I’ve a smartphone finally I’m able to start my collection of hidden faces: sometimes you walk and discover hidden faces in everyday objects, architecture, places or clothes, you want to shoot them but you missed the camera at home…. Finally I can catch the moment and capture the face is looking to me.

I have no precise memory about the first face discovered, I guess it was a drain near my house, but I always wanted to capture those moments, when we realize that there are objects that are watching us. It’s like a superpower that let you see something that other people can’t recognize, is a powerful, short lapse of time where you understand the true nature of the objects, accessing to a parallel world where hidden faces are looking to you

I discovered on Wikipedia that this phenomenon is called Pareidolia, “a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant” Fortunately it is not a disease Indeed it is interesting to find out how to be part of an attitude of deep and ancestral accompanies man from birth. Carl Sagan hypothesized that as a survival technique, Human Beings are “hard-wired” from birth to identify the human face.

The pareidolia process is also the engine of the rorschach test and more, the German doctor Justinus Kerne, who in 1857 published a popular book of poems, each inspired by an ink spot created by accident. In my case, recognizing faces in objects is an activity that feeds my imagination and creativity.

But I would do something more than showing you my collection of faces, I would like to tell about where / how / why of each. A different way to discover and suggest new places and events.

…..

I would start with this one.
My daughter was born minutes ago, i was in the Bolzano hospital coming back home after a looooong night, when I dicovered the Munch Scream on the hospital floor.

Latitude: N 46° 29.58′
Longitude: E 11° 17.29′
Altitude: 279.24 m
Time (UTC): 14:01:4681