PAREIDOLIA - DOTREMONT’S DAUGHTER (2020)
Photos by: Thea Løvstad
FROM THE EDITOR:
“Compiled from decades of research, PAREIDOLA – Dotremont’s Daughter promises nothing, and, like Schrödinger’s cat, both delivers and fails to do so. Is there anything on these pages until you look at them? Is there anything when you do? Both humble and bold, obvious and obscure, vacuous and astute, these works contain the essence of all meaning in their apparent meaninglessness. Or they are simply black ink marks, and their meaning is that they have none. Either way, the cat is in the eye of the beholder.“
An artist book published by Timglaset Ltd.
37 pages.
High quality digital print on high grade matte paper (150 gsm),
with a cover of recycled brown card stock.
Assembled with interscrews from Manchester Automatic Machining Compay Ltd.
A4 landscape format (297 x 210 mm)
“I’m not very susceptible to pareidolia. I see neither faces nor ships when I look at these pages – so what do I see? I see white space pushing and shoving black marks around on the page. These marks jostle and whip-lash and cavort with each other while the white space forges active, rather than conventional, intervals. Conventional intervals signal writing/reading whereas irregular intervals signal drawing/looking. In “Pareidolia” I am both looking and reading - and admiring the astute handling of linguistic white space.”
Rosaire Appel
“Addressing the audience somewhere in between being a viewer and a reader, "PAREIDOLIA" brilliantly pinpoints our need for stability and wholeness in trying to affix the world’s fragments, thus revealing our own mental glitches. From a visual perspective, pareidolia is the glue in which we trust.”
Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim
From the AUTHOR’S NOTE:
The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest.
And always that same pretext is offered – it looks like the thing. There is a dodo for instance. Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it “looks like a dodo”.
Dodo! It looks no more like a dodo than I do.
- Mark Twain, Adam’s Diary
There’s a Norwegian place called Toten, known for its lyrical dialect and charismatic livestock. It’s squished full of elk, grouse, and hermits, roughly 250 miles from the coast, and yet to my mind it’s always been a coastal town. Just something about the name, sounds like a place that invites salty wind and fish intestines and grim Scandinavian drama. This is beside the point, as this book is not about words at all, whatever they sound like. What it is about is unrelated things perceived as connected and significant.
Pareidolia is this tendency in the context of reactions to visual stimuli. A cloud looks like a ship, a cluster of stars looks like a bear, a rock looks like a face. Take Cydonia, the Face of Mars, which was first imaged by the Viking 1 Orbiter; an intersection of valleys and hills looking like a humanoid head pushes its grimace through the iron oxide. As a concept, pareidolia is a subcategory of apophenia, which was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in 1958 as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness” and identified as one of the early stages of schizophrenia. It has since come to mean the normal human susceptibility to seek patterns or meaning in random information. It is the same cognitive tendency that is the focus of the Rorschach test; in theory a tool to study the subconscious and decipher a patient’s personality through their interpretations of ink blots, its results are often as ambiguous as the blots themselves. Humans see meaning where there is none – how human then, to look for a meaning in our own mental glitches.
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