Throughout history, carpets have been played a significant role in the evolution of eastern aesthetics and heritage. In the East, carpet weaving was and is a primarily dominating form of art, with the traditions and skills carefully passed over from one generation to another, while developing and improving methods of making and spreading crafted symbols.
Many different carpet genres usually share the same ornamental forms, such as geometric patterns, floral motifs, and calligraphic shapes; yet some of the combinations are merely specific to certain regions. A neural network computing system, that is trained for using the latest state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm; processes tens of thousands of archived images of traditional carpets, rugs, and kilims from museums and libraries and creates new unlimited combinations based on their similarities. More than 150,000 carpet compositions and sketches were collected over the world by the artist & processed by artificial intelligence.
“Revival of Aesthetics“ creates imaginary rugs that didn’t exist so far by combining the data painting technique, pattern, symbol recognition, thread simulation & color data. While honoring the term “pattern” traditionally; Orkhan Mammadov merges this term with its usage in today’s world; machine algorithms that recognize regularities in data. With the rise of the digital age, importance of adopting the past to the future is crucially important to save our heritage from being disappearing. In addition to rescuing this massively important “tangible” cultural heritage from being locked in museums or being reserved for limited eyes to see and fading away eventually; Mammadov works on these representations of our nation’s cultural history also to secure dialogue between the future and the past, dystopian and utopian. In honor of colliding the past and future of carpets; during the experience, while visitors will be able to witness current locations and uses of the embroideries all over the world; they will also encounter the first-ever carpets of Metaverse.
“Revival of Aesthetics“ explores data as a fruitful and yet thoroughly problematic resource for artistic inspiration in the turbulent epoch of global nomadism, uneven cultural diffusion, and rising nationalist movements. The artist highlights the source and meaning of ornaments with their background history and regional source of them. This digitalization and creation of unlimited possibilities, while preserving the heritage; allows us to step into the new world – metaverse or whatever else is coming next- without losing connection with our ancient roots.