The mechanical headcount at the relevant Onformative page seems to have stopped. We might have surrendered supremacy in chess to supercomputers, but I reckon that picking out faces from satellite images is still a people job. Īlso, it will be interesting to see whether FaceTracker will ‘see’ the face of Evita Peron in Ciudad Evita, the city named – and shaped – after that icon of Argentinian politics and folklore.įor now, my money is on the human element. Other examples are the somewhat primitively drawn images of Jesus, and other Christian imagery, on an Arabian mountainside, or the profile of Ottoman sultan Mehmet II in the shoreline of Istanbul, the city he conquered in 1453. This remarkable geomorphological feature was discovered by a Lynn Hickox in late 2006, perusing Google Earth. The Guardian looks remarkably like a human head wearing Native American headdress – and instead of spoiling the appearance, a recent addition has only heightened the zoomorphism: a road and an oil well look like they’re the Guardian’s earphones. One example is the Badlands Guardian, a landscape feature near Medicine Hat, in the southeast corner of the Canadian province of Alberta. Probably listening to World Music – the Badlands Guardian in Alberta (found here on The Jetpacker). In all probability, the Siberian Snogger is composed of a number of naturally occurring elevations, caused by fluvial and glaciofluvial erosion along the the banks of the Indigirka River, as it winds its way north to the East Siberian Sea. But the landscape in this part of the world is almost as bleak and uninhabited as on Mars, and it’s hard to see who in time immemorial would have braved the elements to build a monument that would only be visible from the sky, through as yet not invented satellites. Like the Face on Mars, the Siberian Snogger’s resemblance to a human face seems too strong to be coincidental. Judging from the data on the map itself, the picture was taken at 62.8492N,156.3910E, which is in the Magadan Oblast, in Russia’s Far East. The most stunning example undoubtedly is that of a right-facing, copper-green profile of a squint-eyed man, his fleshy lips planting a kiss on another mouth – horrifically detached from anything resembling a face. The Onformative website provides a few examples already. The hills are alive in Madagan (image taken from this page at the Onformative website). That face, an eerily lifelike elevation in the Cydonia area of Mars, has generated a lot of speculation and controversy: Is it possible that humans (or humanoids) have left a marker of their ancient presence on the Red Planet? Later, better-quality pictures showed that the face-like picture was nothing more than the coincidental result of low-resolution imaging and some fortuitous imaging. As a major inspiration we took a look at the Face on Mars taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976. We wrote an algorithm simulating this tendency, as it continuously searches for face-like shapes while iterating above the landscapes of the earth. We were driven by the idea, to explore how the psychological phenomenon of Pareidolia, could be generated by a machine. These maps were generated using GoogleFaces, a software application developed by the Berlin design studio Onformative to seek out face-like features in random shapes, and then let loose on Google Maps. And why not? They fuse the age-old urge to see faces in strange places with some very modern facial recognition software. Is cartozoology as dead as the proverbial dodo? Perhaps the maps shown below represent a more fertile strain of allocartography. No new cartographic animals have been rolled out for a decade. We’ve discussed this exciting hybrid of cartography and zoology earlier on this blog, but unfortunately, the website of the Society has remained dormant ever since 2003. The science or practice of discovering and studying animals outlined paradigmatically by street layouts as they appear on maps, especially with reference to physical evidence of the animals’ presence in the corresponding terrain. Why wait around for these zoomorphs to manifest themselves? Instead of passively gathering the most obvious specimens, why not actively hunt the ones that hide deep inside maps? That’s the idea behind the Norwegian Cartozoological Society, which defines cartozoology as:
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