Flickr Learns Me Again!

I have become a bit of a Flickr junkie. I take an inordinate number of amateurish but devoted photos, and load many (though not enough) right onto the tubes through Flickr. I've even got it going through the Curve (though I load through the web, which is oddly more effective than email). But I have not only been attention-whoring with Flickr, giddily lapping up views and comments; nay, I have also been learnin'!

One fine day, browsing the groups on flickr, I noticed a neat featured group, emergence. Well, here I am, massive dork and flickr junkie; what else could I do but join the group? I send the admins my plaudits as well as qualifications, and bangarang, they let me in. Now, some of my favorite pictures are of the fractured remains of subway advertisements that have been removed, and I decided I could cook up an adequate explanation of how the patterns formed by the strips of paper and glue can be recognized as faces or other objects of daily life. But wait! That is nay emergence! What is emergent is the layering, the overlapping colors and forms. But not what we perceive them to be - that is in our heads.

And it has a name.

And a Flickr group.

Pareidolia!

Magical perception, I am not a loony!! Others see the faces, and the buffalo, and the funeral in which the fish jumped over the moon, and so on...

So I have learned a new thing, and it is a thing that is always present in my life - any malformed or corroded object is fodder for my tendency towards pareidolia. How exquisite to find out there are whole online groups devoted to this fancy, and how interested a subject. But wait, there's more!

Posting one of the face-ridden ad scars netted a fair number of views, 50 at last check. And one of those views came from the founder of yet another group - Tachism. Who said "Boy! Yo photo be Tachism! Hook us up!"

And what is Tachism? Hoh hoh, silly Americain! It is a European Abstract painting movement of the 1940's/50's, perhaps the Euro-equivalent of Abstract Expressionism. You know, the silly Americans. In any case, its sweet, fitting, bizarre, and a whole new bag of fun to learn about. So there.