Paredolia and images within images
OCTOBER 8, 2023
Paredolia is a term that describes the human brain's tendancy to see things that are not really there. When viewing something new that we don't visually understand, the brain will try to reference the image back to something in our memory that we have seen before. Hence a swoosh in a line becomes a bird beak, a circular area becomes an eye and a protrusion becomes a nose. This is one of the things I really enjoy about my chosen ICM art form - being able to see things that really aren't there.
When I first produced 'Nestled in a tree' which is composed of a few backlit translucent plastic bags and a glass vase, I was just so-so about it. But then I showed it to my wife, Debby, and she saw something totally different in it. The more I looked at it, in addition to seeing a bird in a tree, I saw a separate face with a protruding nose, a wind tunnel blowing the plastic to the left, and then another face in the whole image with a distinct pair of blue human lips.
This is what keeps me coming back to ICM - a single paredolia is fun, but when an image starts to produce multiple and widely different paredolias every time I look at it, then I really like it. As my work progresses, this is the effect that I am looking for - multiple images that give the piece of work a different meaning every time it is viewed.