2021 Exhibition
30. The Idea of Saving Aesthetics
Artist Information
Historically, carpets play a significant role in forming of Azerbaijan’s heritage and aesthetics. Different carpet schools share the same ornamental forms, such as geometric patterns, floral motifs, and calligraphic shapes, but some of the combinations are specific to certain regions.
Today, a word ‘pattern’ is often associated with machine algorithms that recognize regularities in data. Orkhan and his team designed an AI algorithm to analyze carpet designs and traditional ornaments. After processing the collected data, the neural network system is producing imaginary patterns that could have been Azerbaijani or similar, but all of them never really existed.
The work poses questions about innovation and identity: how an entity must differ from the known to be considered original? How much should be identical to a collected “pre-set” for it to have kinship?
The Idea of Saving 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.
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Orkhan Mammadov
Orkhan Mammadov is a new media artist, researcher, and educator, based in Baku, Azerbaijan. Essentially working through bridging technology and contemporary memories of cultural heritage, Mammadov's work deals with the historical and post-modern, social and cultural contradictions we face every day. Using found symbols and tools made readily available by the cultural research and combined by technological advances, as well as drawing from a unique sensibility influenced by participation in social media communities and artificial intelligence, his practice explores the diverging methods of culture consuming by both notions of online and offline. Technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on symbols and ornaments, the poetic means to document our personal and collective lives and struggles to save history in the 21st century.
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