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Pareidolia

The topic of this week's illustration falls into my snail series, but pareidolia is not, strictly speaking, a fallacy. It is a psychological phenomenon that I feel underlies much fallacious thought, but also much creative thought.

Pareidolia involves the human tendency to perceive a pattern or an organized image in a set of nebulous stimuli. The most common examples involve people seeing Elvis or the Virgin Mary among the shapes that appear on their pancakes or birthmarks, or in images of the surface of the moon. Rorschach inkblot tests make use of pareidolia in attempts to elicit material from the subconscious. Pareidolia can also invoke other senses by causing us to hear voices in radio static or heavy metal songs played backwards. Beneath pareidolia lies the urge to seek patterns and create meaning, to make a confusing and disparate world intelligible.

The urge to think associatively--to seek patterns where patterns don't always exist--can be harmful or constructive. We seek patterns when we generalize and stereotype, or when we hastily link correlation to causation. Pattern seeking is at work in conspiracy theorists who perceive elaborate plots behind every distressing event. Then again, I also seek patterns when I force my eyes to understand an impressionistic painting or when I comprehend a metaphor.

In his book The Demon-Haunted World, late astronomer Carl Sagan suggests that pareidolia has evolutionary roots in our desire to seek faces in visual arrays, a habit that we pick up as infants. The idea is that infants are more likely to survive if they recognize and respond to their parents' faces. As a result, our species is slightly over-programmed to seek faces darn near everywhere, including in our breakfast foods. I don't think we ever really shake the impulse to assign faces, personify, and anthropomorphize. How else can we explain the near world-dominance of LOLcats? Sagan's suggestion makes intuitive sense; I think we look for what we want to see, for what is comforting and familiar, but also for what we fear. I recall jumping and breaking a cup once because I felt a shadow behind me shaped like a person. After two seconds, I remembered that I had temporarily moved a man-sized bookshelf to an odd location just outside the kitchen. I also get the jibblies around unusually mobile pieces of lint that resemble spiders. It's not difficult to speculate evolutionary benefits behind these snap responses.

Pareidolia fascinates me because it marks a place where objectivity steps back and imagination takes over, sometimes in a coup of survival instinct, and sometimes in the slow reading of a symbolic poem. If I always gave in to my urge to pattern-seek, I'd probably never get an accurate picture of the world. However, without it, I'd be unable to respond personally to a book or recognize my own handwriting. For me, pareidolia is not a force for good or bad, but simply a force to be monitored lest I wind up having conversations with my toast and macing my furniture.

This week's piece both utilizes and pokes fun at pareidolia. I originally planned to show a more explicit snail in the illustration, but in the end I decided it was better to imply a snail as viewer.

I used a substantially different illustration style this week. I've always been keen on watercolors and collage, and a few of my handmade pieces have combined the two. Lately, I've been inspired by the collage work of children's book illustrator Eric Carle and by the works of Rex Ray, which overlap the fields of design, crafting, and fine art.

I began by creating a relatively simple vector art illustration with satisfying shapes. Then I used a watercolor wash texture as a fill. I created the texture on a piece of watercolor paper, scanned it at high-resolution, and used the image as a swatch in Illustrator. I'm not usually a fan of drop shadows, but here they give the image depth and a satisfying collage effect. I hope to experiment with the collage effect in future pieces, working in some new textures and possibly including some sketch lines. For now, though, I'm enjoying the simplicity, and the fact that in digital collages, I don't have to deal with ripply paper or rubber cement fumes . . . even if the latter might allow me to see snails in the clouds.





















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