"Muraqqa" AudioVisual Painting
By Orkhan Mammadov - NFT edition 02/03

Listed as NFT on Foundation.app - https://foundation.app/@orkhan/muraqqa-2-venice-biennale-2019-53931

A Muraqqa is an album containing paintings of different miniature styles from different periods in Azerbaijan’s history. The images present a conventional realism and static structure, but the narrative hides inner dynamics. Frozen moments contain rich variations of potential actions.

The artist has reproduced original miniature paintings and represented them as a linear digital story. The authentic traditional Muraqqa becomes a source for the construction of an alternative virtual replica. The artist has added his stories to the original content and created a video installation. He sets the characters of the Muraqqa in motion to play with plot development, and animated effects demonstrate its artificiality.

Viewers witness fictional storytelling that goes far beyond its original context. The miniature paintings’ stories are arguably fake from the outset because they are a product of the artists’ imaginations. The animation represents both fairytales and reliable facts. Following the pictures’ inner dynamics, the artist creates his vision of the represented events. This storytelling reveals the nature of interpretation. This process reveals how the manipulation of content happens.

The artist refers to Azerbaijan’s Biennale Arte 2019 agenda concerning the dissemination of fake news. People have unlimited possibilities when interpreting a singular image or a fact. Therefore, the artist motivates viewers to create new narratives and suggests other ways of connecting and contextualising images.

Artist: ORKHAN MAMMADOV
Curators: Emin Mammadov & Gianni Mercurio

Executor: Heydar Aliyev Foundation
Premiered at: La Biennale di Venezia

Medium: Video Art
Resolution: 4900 x 1080 px
Duration: 4:30 min

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Official links
https://orkhan.art/links

Latest NFT Drops:
https://foundation.app/@orkhan

"Muraqqa" AudioVisual Painting - Venice Biennale 2019 / NFT edition

"The Idea of Saving Aesthetics" By Orkhan Mammadov

  
Historically, carpets play a significant role in forming 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, the word ‘pattern’ is often associated with machine algorithms that recognize regularities in data. Orkhan 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 installation 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.

  
According to historic data and memo records of European researchers and travelers, Mediaeval Azerbaijan was one of the major carpet hubs of the Orient, and after the Islamic Golden age, most of the middle eastern carpet patterns and ornaments became popularized by the western countries. While in Azerbaijan, carpet weaving was primarily a dominating form of art, with the traditions and skills carefully passed over from one generation to another, through developing and improving methods of making and spreading crafted symbols. By approaching these representations of our nation’s cultural history, with the help of AI, we get a dialogue between the future and the past, dystopian and utopian.

In this exhibition, the artist highlights the source and meaning of ornaments with the background history and regional source of them. During the exhibition experience, visitors will be able to witness current locations and uses of the embroideries all over the world.

"The Idea of Saving Aesthetics" AI Art - Moscow Biennale 2019 / Unique NFT edition

Culture is a source of inspiration and education, and that is why humanity has kept and preserved it. Society conserves culture by constantly repeating traditions, values, rules, and rituals. However, society also understands the necessity of updating. Cultural development leads to optimizing processes by using new technologies. In a computer epoch, data becomes the crucial form of cultural communication instead of traditional narrative. Data is a complex of diverse information that is usually disorganized.

The installation employs data consisting of traditional ornaments. Using the latest state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Neural network computing system that processed more than 15.000 archived ornamental images from museums and libraries. It creates new unlimited combinations based on their similarities. “Circular Repetition“ creating imaginary patterns that didn’t exist so far.

Repetition is the precious data that we hold from our perspective. Therefore, it is no longer an individual idea of something we perceive; it’s also the traces we leave behind. However, perhaps with machine intelligence we can redefine the concept of repetition.

The installation’s visual component imitates traditional Azerbaijani patterns. As a result, viewers see how AI builds new alternatives. These alternatives have a synthetic nature that has nothing to do with the history of authentic ornament patterns. AI imitates and fakes a traditional learning process usually handed down from generation to generation. By accessing the data of authentic ornament images, AI becomes an independent master that can invent new ideas to update culture.

Besides symbols, AI generates new concepts and meanings. It blurs the boundaries between reality and the fake. These actions further prove cultural development, as non-human intelligence replaces traditional craft tools.

  
Artist & Director: ORKHAN MAMMADOV 

Curators: Emin Mammadov & Gianni Mercurio

Executor: Heydar Aliyev Foundation 

Premiered at: La Biennale di Venezia

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Orkhan Mammadov