Synthetic Pareidolia 2024
Materials and technique: series of four framed works, Adobe Photoshop software (v. 25.5.0), digital printing on paper. Dimensions: 100 x 25cm. Period of creation: 2024
Exhibited in the exhibition Bio-Automatism, Techno-Automatism, AI-Automatism. Automatism in the Metamodern Era. Curator Atanas Totlyakov. Exhibition Halls “Rafael Mihailov,” Veliko Turnovo
"The title Synthetic Pareidolia by Denitsa Milusheva speaks for itself: through artificial intelligence, she explores the recognition of forms within amorphous blotches—a process deeply characteristic of human perception and has long been incorporated into machine learning. This principle is used in training AI to analyze and imagine new forms, enabling creativity. Milusheva, however, reverses the experiment—shifting the focus from the machine back to the human."
— Excerpt from a text by Yanitsa Fendulova
"Synthetic Pareidolia" by Denitsa Milusheva is a series of four framed works created in 2024 using AI-generated images and digital printing. The artwork explores the phenomenon of pareidolia—the human tendency to see familiar forms, such as faces, in random patterns. Milusheva created these abstract images by providing keywords to an AI generator and asking it to transform the words into abstract forms. These forms were intentionally designed to evoke pareidolia, inviting viewers to recognize familiar shapes within the abstract visuals. The series highlights the creative potential of using language to guide machine-generated imagery, bridging the gap between human imagination and artificial intelligence. It raises questions about where perception ends and interpretation begins and whether AI’s outputs can simulate a form of "machine consciousness."
Video interview with Denica Milusheva about her work “Synthetic Pareidolia“ at the exhibition “Bio-Automatism, Techno-Automatism, AI-Automatism“, curator At. Totlyakov
Video editing: Nurkan Nuf and Yanitsa Fendulova