I see faces

This generative design project, originally developed with Processing, plays with a grid of symmetrical lozenges whose binary arrangements (black and white) invite projection. Very quickly, the human eye makes out faces, expressions, figures. A well-known phenomenon: pareidolia. But here it is the computer that produces these shapes, and we who look for them. A loop closes: the human as a recognition machine, and the machine as a generator of patterns to be interpreted.

The title, borrowed from a viral Twitter hashtag, echoes the hypermodernity of the gesture: spot, isolate, classify, tag. And yet the image remains undetermined. Noise becomes raw material. What could have been interference becomes a formal source. The series thus reflects on the very matter of the image, on what lies within, below or beyond the visible.

Strangely, this work echoes another one, shown at the École des beaux-arts in Wavre in 2012, made with a handheld scanner (a device I am particularly fond of) and Google Earth (scanning Google Earth is a conceptual experiment in itself ;-) ).