Face Daydreamers | Flaw of delusion or confirmed humanity?
- A collective experiment about Pareidolia
2020.8 // Time
Co-designer // Contributions
Self-initiated project co-designed with Jiwei & Sen // Owner
This self-initiated project started with a common hobby of shooting faces-on-objects photos among the 3 designers. The tendency of humans to recognize non-human objects with expressional and emotional faces is called #pareidolia. The fascination of humans’ capability motivated us to understand this witty common mechanism and dig deeper into the discussion on objects and humans.
Throughout the 2-month designing journey, we have built a platform for the audience to review and contribute the found “faces”. Further, we expanded our research via 3 experimentations on recognition footprint, perceived expressions, and CAPTCHA possibility of this phenomenon.
In 2020 while the whole world is demanded to be quiet and inactive, we stayed home too long and started to crave human interactions, or just seeing human faces in real life. #Pareidolia is a tendency of humans to recognize non-human objects with expressional and emotional faces. together with two other designers, Jiwei and Sen, we started the face daydreaming journey of this witty but timely relevant subject. Whether for entertainment or out of true curiosity, exploring deeper this subject seems to be a kind reminder of our humanness.
3 Little Experiments
We have proudly evolved to have this ability to rapidly recognise faces on objects, which was beneficial for identifying similar races and surviving from an unfamiliar environment. As a consequence, we are equipped with “pareidolia”. Whether on purpose or accidental, where there are humans, there is imagination.
This can be a growing face-daydreaming map. Imagine when the data points are dense enough, the map might echo the diagram of human activity. Where there are humans, there must be imagination.
[Matty]
Two adjacent dots naturally trigger us to associate another nearby object as the mouth. The "finding" process often triggers a moment of "wow" and a touch of empathy when the final face is formed, by our brain. This triggers Jiwei (co-designer) to build an interactive tool to co-create the “wow” effect via imagination
[Jiwei]
I Am Not A Robot
Shall we hurray for this delusion? If pareidolia is something humans developed and embedded in our brain, can we use this to create the CAPTCHA tool to distinguish real humans and computers? Although nowadays AI is able to falsely recognize human faces, Sen took this idea further and created a retro-mini game to test “how human-imaginative you are”
[Sen]
Face Daydreamers 臉錯樂園
A platform was created to collect people’s opinions on these curated “faces” regarding their difficulties and associated expressions. If another face-lover spotted an interesting face, the site also allows to Contribute faces by uploading the image.
Public Showcase
The project was published via MAM (Modern Art Museum Shanghai)’s Social Account，entitled 《错错错，是脸的错》 (Editor, Hangping 🐑). We shared more insights and our progress in text and video format on this article (in Chinese).
