Relic

Relic is built on an archive of carpet patterns that Mammadov collected over seven years. A generative adversarial network studies the archive for likeness: which forms recur, and which sit close to one another. It then produces patterns of its own, seven works in all. Their structure is familiar, and they correspond to no woven carpet. To a weaver a pattern is a design carried by hand. In computing it is a regularity found in data. The work holds both meanings. At a related presentation in Dubai in 2022 the cables of the screens were left tangled and visible at the back. A hand-knotted carpet is checked by turning it over and reading the knots, and the wiring does the same job here. The series asks who holds a tradition once it is a dataset.