My pareidolia knows no bounds.

<font color="limegreen">"Now that the MRO images are coming in nicely, and they have resolved their software issues, it's not hard for us pareidolists to sit back and enjoy the show. I guess we figure if someone from the artificiality camp comes up with something concrete, they would plaster it all over the internet"</font id="limegreen">

just like your assumptions of pare doo doo
You would be wrong...

Mars is a story.. It's not fortune cookie insert..

our entrance into the story started with mariner 4 not the Mro..

Early in this thread I posted the following quote from Alexander Boes, a face hunter living in Norway:

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">"Very detailed faces are rare. But crude faces and otherwise detailed faces missing one or more important parts are very easy to find. It’s a bit of ‘The tip of the iceberg’ situation. Only the very best are worth taking pictures of, since there are endless of places to go. At least here." Alexander Boes<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This is probably the single most important element in the process of constructing the pareidolic image both in ones own mind and in passing that information on to the next viewer.

As soon as we allow the inclusion of faces "missing one or more important parts", we open the floodgates. Also, aside from missing parts, the same thing applies to misplaced features. Things such as missing noses, invisible mouths, eyes in the wrong place, no chin, and the like, one can literally find hundreds of images that the mind can easily fuse into quite striking resemblences of human or animal faces and bodies.

One of the techniques I use to find faces in the trees is imagining the face is "behind" the tree, like a spy hiding in the trees looking out at whoever he's spying on. Once you get the hang of it, you find that a missing or misplaced feature is no problem, and does not detract from the final product. For instance, if there's a branch or branches right where the mouth should be, and even if it doesn't really look at all like a mouth (same is true for eyes, eyebrows, etc.) the end result is not weakened because we simply imagine that the branch or branches is <b>covering </b>the mouth. That way we can ignore the fact that the branch doesn't really look like an artist's rendition of a mouth. The mouth is obstructed in this case.

Using this technique I have found literally tens of face images in one tree on many occasions. Some of them are quite striking.

One time I sent Fred a couple of pictures and he pointed out about ten faces that I hadn't noticed until he mentioned them, demonstating once again to me the personal nature of the pareidolic image. I could see the ones he found quite easily once he pointed them out, but I had been looking at a somewhat more macro view of that scene and found larger faces "behind" the tree, whereas his were smaller and were openings in the tree more than mine were.

This can be done in just about any medium, provided the viewer has the right frame of mind, and believes they are "findable". The process is much like (if not exactly like) the "gestalt" discussed by JP Levasseur in one of his papers, where he uses the spotted dalmation to demonstrate this.

rd

Perhaps scientists and artists have a different way of valuing pareidolic images. I believe we should see and value both ways. The overall gestalt should be the main determining factor. I have taken at least one of my best photographs ("Dancer" not on the web) which has virtually NO facial features, (just a hint of an eye, nose, mouth and hair) and only eight body features.) Despite this, virtually everyone readily sees this image. What modern and oriental art has always been about is how much can be depicted with how little physicality. Although I love the detail and number of features found in pareidolia, artistically I equally love the amount of art that can be shown with the minimal number of features. If one could find a pareidolic image with three countable features, that could be recognized by 99% of the general population, it would most likely be excellent artistically. Of course when one uses words to talk about art much is lost, and it helps to transcend argument and see afresh with open eyes. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but
in having new eyes." -- Marcel Proust

To contradict part of what I just wrote. Meditating a little longer and deeper, on images such as stone soup, I would have to say that each image must be judged individually. No simple formula or statement can be applied that is truly meaningful, although a high number of countable features on one figure is impressive.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by pareidoliac</i>
<br /> "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." -- Marcel Proust <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Yes, that's another way of saying the same thing I said:
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">This can be done in just about any medium, provided the viewer has the right frame of mind, and believes they are "findable". The process is much like (if not exactly like) the "gestalt" discussed by JP Levasseur in one of his papers, where he uses the spotted dalmation to demonstrate this.rd<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">But never underestimate the contortions some people will go through, to avoid anything that contradicts what "their eyes" tell them is there. It is apples and oranges to take a known Earthly image and photoshop half the face, and then try to relate that somehow with the process of the mind creating a Pareidolic image out of tree branches, or the local terrain on Mars or Earth. In one case, the mind already knows the image, and recognizes it as such. In the other case, there is nothing known up front, and the mind creates the image from the soup. We are talking about the latter case.

If you ever have an opportunity to visit Grand Coulee Damn in Washington, when you leave take highway 155 south to Coulee City. As you follow the highway along Banks Lake, you pass through a number of places where they had to blast through rock to let the highway go through. It's similar to what Alexander Boes talked about when he mentioned the frequency of high quality faces where the granite was blasted in Norway. There are so many faces that a true Pareidolist like myself found it difficult to drive without going off the road either into the lake or into oncoming traffic.

I kept telling my wife to snap the camera, but even though she thinks all of the Mars images are pareidolia, she's not quite as gung ho about snapping Earthly pareidolia as I might be, and is slow to react. Unfortunately, it was the kind of road where there's a gaurd rail and no stopping. Although a person could go back there in the summer on a little boat.

It is not that big a leap to think that there was "blasting" in Mars rocks from some type of natural causes in Mars' past history, that resulted in similar formations, some maybe on a much larger scale. There is an enormous similarity.

Note the similarity between Alexander Boe's photo (shown here) and "Wil" from the Faces topic. Is there any doubt that if a "Mars Anomoly Hunter" found this face in the Martian landscape, he or she would gleefully trot it out for all to see, as proof that Martians once decorated Mars with landscape artworks?:




rd

rd- Let's give credit where it is due and say YOU are saying the same thing Proust said, and not the other way around. After all he died before you were born. (1922).