Pareidolic Visions | Experimental Studies

Hey everyone 👋This is Akshata!
In this post, let me acquaint you with one of my crucial ongoing art projects - Pareidolic Visions and its background.

So, what’s Pareidolia?

“Pareidolia (Ancient Greek παρα (para, “alongside, concurrent”) // εἴδωλον (eídōlon, “image”) is a psychological phenomenon where the human mind perceives meaningful shapes like human facial characteristics in random, vague data.”

Coinage & History

One of the most ancient examples of Pareidolia used in Indian Temple Architecture

A swatch noticed during the print making sessions back in the college days.

I wasn’t aware of this earlier, though. I brought this info down here from my thesis.
Let alone the coining of the word, I didn’t even know such a concept ever existed.
As a child, I used to get haunted and confused by seeing faces emerge out of a random rough texture of a wall, in the clouds, in my closet amidst the pile of clothes, in the shadows - almost anywhere! Gradually, these incidents increased in intensity and now, they have been quite frequent as I have grown fond of them.

Pareidolic Ambiguity in Art

An Undergraduate Empirical research

Being always curious about the unusual, I chose this as my subject for undergrad thesis (circa 2019 in pre-covid era)

A screenshot of one of my Instagram’s story highlights. These are my precious ‘Pareitifacts’ I have been collecting through photos!

Well, honestly, it was difficult to contextualise my findings into a unique, constructive and critical piece of literature!
Still, got to learn a lot! Artists like Salvador Dali, Giuseppe Archimboldo, Nandalal Bose played a vital role in all this.🙏🏼

Here is a link to my thesis, if you wish to go through it!

Some experiments done engaging basic objective forms like vase, plant, table, fruits, leaves, drawing horse, etc.

So, throughout the process, I simultaneously began my empirical (practical) studies employing several projects and have been continuing till date.

Like the very title suggests, these works explore and interpret the instances of pareidolic perceptions through art.

Medium – Graphite Pencil on an old, blotchy paper. This piece is a pure spontaneous creation from random blotches of damaged, old windowpane paper. There is no logical link between the forms.

The most beautiful thing about Pareidolic or any kind of abstract art is that as sentient beings, we get to evolve with the work through time, exposure and experience.

A few older works based on Pareidolia…

‘The H I D D E N’ - Created using Adobe Fresco
A self-portraited work combining two of my projects (Pareidolic Visions and Self-Face Experiments)

A detail from the drawing I made on my room’s patchy wall as a result of seepage. There were lots of self-generated forms there.

And one of my best works…

‘Tuning with the Tea’- mixed media on paper

This one isn’t particularly based on Pareidolia but it kind of reasonated with the concept and workings. A spontaneous, meditative creation of mine, for which I’ll always be thankful!

Thanks for stopping by and reading my post!