Staring ever upward and frozen in time
Peeking from alongside the widening crack
Never slipping down and always around.
Stepped heavy upon and witness to crime
Creaking softly the only sign of talking back
Forest from trees and no more feel of breeze.
Years gone by and gone those past prime
The darkening eyes slowly fading to black
With cover of white to hide you from sight.
"Pareidolia" is a term used in psychology for the very human process to find faces in inanimate objects. Well before I knew the term, I noticed it in myself as a small child, as I would see faces in everything and would often imagine what kind of character or personality was behind the face and perhaps, how it ended up being there at all. I don't know if other people did this, but as a kid at least, I tended to spend a lot of time by myself and therefore had to have a pretty active imagination to keep entertained.
Today, we pick up where we have left off with the renovation and will begin tearing things apart downstairs. We are keeping as much of the original as we can, including the wooden floors, but we will be painting over them in white, hiding the thousands of faces that are peeking our from the grainnand have borne witness since they were laid, most likely back when the house was built in the early sixties.
We have been living down here while the upstairs has been renovated, and all of these little faces have been constant companions and I have spent some time like I would have as a child, getting to know a few of them that I would see daily. There are foxes and birds, sloths and insects all there for the world to see, if anyone stopped to notice them. Some of them are happy, some curious, some scared, some angry - but each holds a personality and a unique story - in my head.
I don't know about everyone, but I find myself having to create opportunity for imagination more than when I was a kid and I feel it is because my mind is always busy, there is little time for creative thought. My writing is of course one of the spaces I get to free-think, but much of my life is thought-directed by activities. What I have found however is that compared to the years where I was consuming a lot of engineered content, I am far more creative now than I was. It is as if the act of consuming creativity diminished my own ability to create independently. I believe that children are far less creative on average than they were in the past, with much of their imagination actually repetition guided by consumption.
I have an art project in mind for these faces and will photograph more of them over the coming weeks so I can use them later, before they are gone from view under a layer of paint. I don't know if I will ever get around to actually doing it, but in my head it seems like a good idea - which is where creativity begins. Things can be created without thought, but without intention, is it art?
That is something that to be considered for another day, as for now, I have to dive back into activities that steal my attention, so there is precious little bandwidth left to imagine the stories of all the faces I see.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
Kind of spooky looking face.
Best to paint over them.
The first ones remind me of aliens, but the last one is definitely from Ice Age 😃:
:D :D
This is exactly it!!! His story was already told :)
Should've posted this in Alien Art. :D
Is there a community? :D
Hold on. Aliens are already nearby :D
Just under our toes
You're not alone in this. Pareidolia is very typical for human beings. Even the Upper Palaeolithic artists used pareidolia when creating pictures: Altamira is a cave in northern Spain where have been found a lot of paintings and drawings oft he Upper Palaeolthic. There is no agreement on the dating, probably anytime between 33,600 and 11,000 before Christ.
Source of qutation and picture:
https://www.donsmaps.com/altamirapaintings.html
These are cool. Don't you find it interesting how hardwired we are and how unchanging over large periods of time?
It's very intersting. My impression: Man came into being rather suddenly (with art like in Altamira), and has remained the same until today. This thesis could perhaps be tested one day.
Nature makes a face in woods. wondrous!!!!!
Some of them a cute - some not so much
Like looking at clouds, it looks like an alien face or a headless genie about to clap his drum-like hands, I see no Mother Mary in this tree, my hands are not bleeding I swear.
I am guess that an obsessive compulsive could focus on these things as signs and perhaps someone else could take it one step further and add meaning too.
Hey there's a very famous house in Spain known for the faces in the floor! I think it's one of the most known cases of Pareidolia I've heard of
Have you ever visited?
No sadly, i don't know if it's open for public! But i read so much about it as a little child. There was a program in Venezuelan radio called "Nuestro Insólito Universo"(Our unusual universe) which covered a bunch of mysteries and they introduced me to this. Apparently there have been a lot of investigation surrounding the house cus they whole thing has been deemed as a paranormal thing and to be fair the faces are really creepy hahahaha
Human faces... Those are legit Aliens living on your floor. Maybe don't put paint in their eyes, might make them angry.
lol. I have worried a little about what they will think when I paint over them. Perhaps start moving about under the paint.
Part of my art process at times involved this phenomena. I could spend an hour or more simply smearing colors in all directions, attempting to be as random as humanly possible. Waiting for them to arrive. Once they showed up, I'd finish the job.
Random as humanly possible might not be that random, if you are a determinist :)
I have occasionally tried to trace my thoughts to see their origin. Sometimes it is easy, generally it is impossible. I think art can be used as part of that processing of our surroundings, driven into thought and then presented.
One can learn to lose control, efficiently.
I think that is the art of it.
How many faces can you spot here? I'm seeing four, two pairs facing each other on both sides of the painting and the two that stand out is the one to the far left looking like Star War's Darth Plagueis looking at a young Luke Skywalker to the far right side. The two faces in the middle could be Darth Maul on the left followed by Han Solo to the right.
More than four.
I love imagining stories behind the faces and figures I see in just about everything. It is a pleasant little pastime especially when you have an overactive imagination!
In my head, they are all a bit randy.
Lol. Filthy bugger. I'm my head mine are all aliens and fantastical beasts!
When I was a kid, I would stare at the wallpaper and see my older brother, if you stare long enough at anything you might seeing black dots appear or almost anything really.
Did you live in Amytiville?
Yup, I can relate to this. I think that many people have this. When I was a kid I liked to look at clouds a lot (I still do) and loved to imagine shapes and figures.
I see very alienish figures in these pictures lol
!ENGAGE20
They are alienish, but I can also see stylized animals in them - kind of like manga.
I never really did the cloud thing that much - no idea why :D
Jeez, these are pretty scarry! I never paid attention to such details lol
This one is stoned and happy
Looks better haha
Bueno tu post, lo comparto en mi cuenta, sea visto por mas personas.
Yikes, my first thought was the cover of this book :
Some serious high strangeness on the floor
ENGAGEtokens.I blame excessive school/work days over excessive consumption for lack of imagination XP
Some pretty interesting patterns in the floorboards, will they show up through the paint or is it so thick is smoothes the floorboards out?
To some degree, but it is likely two sides of the same coin, where people consume to avoid work, work to consume more. Not time to create in that loop.
The demons will be covered completely. The wood isn't of the greatest quality, but we can't afford to change it :D