Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Felix (in Episode 25) about his lessons to illustration students at the Munster School of Design. He spoke about a concept he has coined drainting - an “intuitive combination of drawing and painting”. He said he makes his students paint silhouettes before they draw lines. This is a way to capture gestures and pose in the human form, and to find character and personality in inanimate buildings and structures.

How do you find personality in things that are not human? How does a building’s silhouette say anything about character? The word he uses is pareidolia.

Pareidolia is a form of apophenia, which is a more general term for the human tendency to seek patterns in random information. Like seeing shapes in clouds, or finding rock formations that look like faces.

Of course, there is not really a face on the rocks. There is no elephant up in the clouds. It is merely human imagination. Pointless. Right?

But it is useful.

Felix uses it to teach drawing - capturing information, and bestowing meaning upon things that do not otherwise have them. As artists, we need to see things that are not there, and render them in a way that the viewer also sees them, and recognizes them as we do. That is the essence of art.

As humans, we seek patterns in everything we experience in our world. Human history is littered with innumerable patterns of our collective imagination. We have used mass illusion to achieve great ends. We drew lines across the night-sky, to connect stars that are lightyears away from us, and lightyears away from each other. Those lines formed shapes to resemble objects from our world, and we tied them to stories we told each other about heavenly beings in charge of our lives. For thousands of years, these stories have given both fear and hope, and inspired both courage and humility.

We used those lines - that do not exist - to find a way when we were lost and in the dark. Over land or sea, they helped us chart a way forward, and also to go back home.

It is not necessary that our patterns correspond to something real. A professor in my control engineering class described systems modeling this way:

All models are wrong. But some models are useful.

It is something I keep in mind when thinking about science, but also about religion and philosophy and whatever else we like to call ‘the truth’.