Islamic art enters the digital world

The Azerbaijani artist, Orkhan Mammadov, draws his inspiration and artistic themes from miniatures and antique carpets, and translates that inspiration into algorithms that take the lines of traditional Islamic art from his world and take him towards the 21st century and the world of digital “metaverse”.

In 2019, he represented his country at the Venice Biennale, presenting examples of Islamic art mixed with the latest computing technologies. Miniatures emerge from under Mammadov’s hand and computer to address the modern world, mixing ancient graphics with modern technology. The characters in his work are the same as those on the original manuscripts, but Mammadov has her digital life in front of us.

Mammadov’s art ranges from miniatures to antique carpets and to its distinctive patterns and colors. Here, too, he takes the well-known carpet designs in his country to the digital world, as he recently exhibited them at “Art Dubai” and attracted the exhibition’s audience with moving carpets, their colors intertwine and their motifs rippled on the screens. The show was titled “Exclusivity in Heritage,” and through it, the videos he developed were presented to the virtual world based on algorithms he designed himself in an attempt to depict the similarities between carpet designs and heritage motifs. In order to reach the digital form, he entered more than 150,000 archival images of carpets, rugs, kilims and miniatures through a computing system that presents the heritage through a digital lens.

“I cloned the same carpet-making process, but instead of threads, algorithms were used to create digital colors and shapes,” Mammadov says. “What you see is a mixture of about 10 carpets, and this is what I call the term digital weaving.”
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