Gallery Entry
Syntethic Pareidolia
By Samuel Lopez-Lago · ES
Synthetic Pareidolia explores the transformation of an accidental visual resemblance into a deliberately constructed synthetic portrait. The work begins with a photograph of an ordinary sink whose taps, faucet and small surface mark unintentionally resemble two eyes, a nose and a mouth. This perceptual effect is an example of pareidolia: the human tendency to recognise familiar forms, particularly faces, in ambiguous objects. Rather than asking an AI system to invent a face from scratch, I used this pre-existing visual ambiguity as the conceptual and formal starting point. The model was instructed to translate the perceived face into a human portrait while retaining the geometry, proportions, colours and material logic of the original object. The circular metal fittings remain the eyes, the faucet retains its distinctive silhouette as the nose, and the narrow mark beneath it becomes the mouth. The dusty pink ceramic surface is transformed into skin while preserving the original palette and traces of wear. The work considers the relationship between human and machine perception. The AI does not originate the pareidolia. The face is first recognised by a human observer; the artificial system is then used to materialise that act of recognition. The resulting image occupies an unstable space between portrait and object, recognition and projection, biological and artificial vision. It asks whether the face belongs to the sink, to the viewer who sees it, or to the machine that is instructed to reconstruct it.