found by PS, age 10

After experiencing my Interface series, you might find yourself experiencing a phenomenon similar to the Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency bias or the frequency illusion. This occurs when something you’ve recently become aware of suddenly seems to appear everywhere.

I get this all the time. Children especially enjoy this game of finding faces. I enjoy when people share with me the images they find.

The Interface series focuses on finding human-like faces in everyday mechanical objects, highlighting the concept of pareidolia, where the brain seeks significance in random stimuli, like seeing faces in clouds. According to Carl Sagan, human beings are “hard-wired” to identify the human face as a survival mechanism.

Here’s the process behind the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in the context of encountering the Interface series:

• Initial Exposure: You are introduced to the idea of seeing faces in everyday objects through the photographs. These images reveal anthropomorphic qualities in unexpected places.
• Increased Awareness: The series acts to strengthen the viewer’s “perceptive muscle” for face recognition. Once your brain is primed to look for these faces, you begin noticing them more often in your daily environment.
• Ubiquitous Faces: You start seeing faces on the street, in industrial designs, and in various objects that you would not have previously recognized. This is not just a trick of your mind, but also a reflection of the designers’ brains (a trick of their minds) that unknowingly created objects with faces in them.
• Beyond Illusion: The Interface series is not just about the illusion of seeing faces but also the reality that these faces exist in the designs around us. The series captures how the camera can make the invisible visible, highlighting the interplay between human perception and design. The objects are a reflection of the anonymous people that build and roam the cities.

So, while the Baader-Meinhof effect might explain why the faces seem to appear everywhere after seeing the Interface series, these faces are also genuinely present in the environment and the result of the human propensity to seek and create them.

“The work is about the joy and the fun of seeing these faces, but it’s also about human perception and how we can use photography to teach us something about how our minds work”.

Just as your musings on blue plastic suddenly make that color seem ubiquitous, the Interface series makes you more attuned to the “faces” that are already all around you.