ABSTRACT
In recent times it has been hard to avoid the contemporary fascination for ‘pareidolia’—that curious act of facial recognition performed upon everyday things and places—when variously smiling, perplexed, or grimacing faces are identified in such unlikely objects as cheese graters, parking meters, or coat hooks. Such instances are often shared online via specific sites, blogs, and social networks using an #iseefaces hashtag; British comedian Dave Gorman has an amusing Flickr pool devoted to the matter, and photographer Francois Robert produced a best-selling calendar featuring pictures of the ‘faces’ he discerned among mops, sockets, and hinges. That the phenomenon also appeared in the 2013 Venice Biennale—when examples from surrealist Roger Callois’s collection of ‘pictorial stones’ were exhibited, including among their number an agate wherein emerges the form of a ghostly little creature to which had been assigned the name Le Petit Fantôme—demonstrates something of its enduring interest to artists and scholars of aesthetics, alongside those who find such stuff merely diverting.
