Tuesday 26 February 2013

Pareidolia

File:Martian face viking.jpg
The Face of Mars
Its often struck me that what we view in nature can rendered illusory. The the term 'Pareidolia', from the Greek; para. meaning something faulty and wrong, and the noun eidōlon, meaning image, form or shape, gives a historical definition to visual literacy .
I was at a symposium on the Namatjira hertage at Hermansberg/ Ntaria. One of the speakers talked of seeing things in the landscape like faces in profile, animals, etc and also in the paintings of indigenous watercolour painting. He touched on pareidolia to explain if this was the case for indigenous painters. Did they see ancestors and dreaming figures in the landscape? I hadn't known of this term to describe frequent visual phenomena. Of course viewing clouds has always been subject to bouts of pareidolia.

From Wiktionary.
"The Face on Mars” was one of the most striking and remarkable images taken during the Viking missions to the red planet. Unmistakably resembling a human face, the image caused many to hypothesize that it was the work of an extraterrestrial civilization. Later images revealed that it was a mundane feature rendered face-like by the angle of the Sun.

From http://www.livescience.com/25448-pareidolia.html
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, which is a more generalized term for seeing patterns in random data. Some common examples are seeing a likeness of Jesus in the clouds or an image of a man on the surface of the moon.
Famous examples of pareidolia
A prime example of pareidolia and its connection to religious images is the Shroud of Turin, a cloth bearing the image of a man — which some believe to be Jesus — who appears to have suffered trauma consistent with crucifixion. The negative image was first observed in 1898, on the reverse photographic plate of amateur photographer Secondo Pia, who was allowed to photograph it while it was being exhibited in the Turin Cathedral. Some visitors to St. Mary's in Rathkaele, Ireland, say a tree stump outside of the church bears a silhouette of the Virgin Mary. Damage to the Pedra da Gávea, an enormous rock outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, created an impression that many interpret as a human face. 


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