These Artists Are Mapping the Earth ... With Facial Recognition Software

Have you ever looked up into the sky and seen a cloud that vaguely resembles your mother? Or gazed at the twisted trunk of a tree, only to see an old man gazing back at you? Then you have experienced pareidolia, the human mind's tendency to read significance into random stimuli. You have learned what children and poets already knew: that anything -- any place -- can be a canvas for a human face.

Computers are learning the same lesson. Only they're doing so with the help of some ingenious humans. The generative design studio Onformative combined facial recognition software with Google Earth images to create "Google Faces," a search agent "that hovers the world to spot all the faces that are hidden on earth."

The project has found, for example, this: 

And this:

And this:

As Onformative explains of the project:

The way we perceive our environment is a complex procedure. By the help of our vision we are able to recognize friends within a huge crowd, approximate the speed of an oncoming car or simply admire a painting. One of human's most characteristic features is our desire to detect patterns. We use this ability to penetrate into the detailed secrets of nature. However we also tend to use this ability to enrich our imagination. Hence we recognize meaningful shapes in clouds or detect a great bear upon astrological observations.

Despite all this, sometimes it's hard (for this human, at any rate) to see the faces the software seems to be seeing. All I get is Earth. But when the project works, it really works. And it offers a whole new way to know the faces that lurk on the surface of the Earth -- faces of inhuman humanity, waiting to be discovered.

Hat tip Animal New York via Ashley Fetters