Pareidolia. AI finds faces on grains of sand

We might not encounter the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, the head of Boris Johnson in a chicken korma or a teddy bear on Mars every day but most of us have “seen” animals in clouds and faces on tree trunks. It’s called Pareidolia, a phenomenon that arises when our mind perceives familiar patterns in a stimulus, even when they are not there.

Driessens & Verstappen had the intuition that they could find human faces even on grains of sand. Given the size of the grains and the colossal amount of sand on Earth, the search for faces in sand looked like a hopeless assignment. Until they developed the technology to do just that.

Driessens & Verstappen, Pareidolia, sandface #0068

Driessens & Verstappen, Pareidolia, sandface #0002

Driessens & Verstappen, Pareidolia, 2019. Installation view, Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Pareidolia, a work I discovered at Meta.Morf. Trondheim Biennale for Art and Technology, uses facial recognition software to examine sand particles one by one, looking for faces in their shape. A custom-made face-detection system examines every grain of sand under the microscope. Each time a face is discovered, its portrait is automatically captured on a photo. The artists keep count of the top 100: as more grains are evaluated, the top 100 features increasingly better faces. The top 100 are shown on a round projection screen, which form alludes to the lens of the microscope.

The work gives value to sand and reminds us of our deep connection with the material. Sand is one of the most traded and stolen commodities on Earth after water. We come into contact with it all day long: in the display of our phones, in the concrete and windows of our homes, in roads, in paint…. Even beaches, natural or artificial, increasingly need sand to keep tourists coming.

Driessens & Verstappen, Pareidolia, 2019

Driessens & Verstappen, Pareidolia, 2019. Installation view, Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

I thought this one looked a bit like Donald Trump

Pareidolia also parodies our anthropocentric worldview, whereby everything revolves around us and we deploy the most sophisticated technologies to satisfy an absurd desire to find our own image in tiny grains of sand.

Pareidolia is at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst and other venues across Trondheim until 18 August. The festival Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies is curated by Zane Cerpina, Boris Debackere, Espen Gangvik and Florian Weigl.

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