Revival of Aesthetics

Revival of Aesthetics starts from thousands of carpets that Mammadov digitised. A carpet's ornament is a form of record: geometric, floral and calligraphic shapes that pass a household's history from one generation to the next. The images were given to a generative adversarial network. This is a pair of neural networks in which one produces pictures and the other judges whether they pass for the originals. Each improves against the other until the output holds. The results are carpet designs that follow the logic of the old ones and were never woven. The series accompanied the room-scale projection of the same name at the Theatre of Digital Art, Dubai, in 2022. The work asks why a painted canvas is ranked above a carpet, and what is lost when heritage is handled as raw data.