![]() 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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