Painting the Hidden Language of AI

In Sailcode, the Chesapeake Bay meets the world of data. Each repeated pattern holds a fragment of culture, while every line connects them like a hidden knowledge map.

From my seat in Ego Alley, I watch sailboats glide through the narrow heart of Annapolis. Their masts rise like circuit lines against the sky, sails billowing like data packets crossing a network as gulls wheel and call overhead.

In my mind, the scene becomes a living dataset, colors, shapes, and rhythms arranging into a knowledge map I later translate into my art. It’s in this setting that my paintings take shape. Every piece is hand-painted, yet my process draws on both ancient craft and modern ideas.

I work with stencils — shablons — a centuries-old technique from my Persian heritage, using them to layer and repeat patterns. In AI terms, each layer is like a set of data points, adding detail, depth, and context to the whole.

Before I begin painting, I work right on the canvas, starting with the first lines that will guide the composition. Then I set the overall palette, the colors that will shape the mood and atmosphere of the piece. These first steps are like my “opening notes,” quickly capturing the movement of light, the flow of colors, and the shapes that stand out to me.

From there, I turn to my collection of stamps, stencils and silkscreens, one precious stamp inherited from my mother, a set of Persian geometric patterns and Persepolis-inspired designs given to me by a dear friend, others I’ve found through online shops, and a few special ones I bought in an art store in France. My collection comes from all over the world, the UK, Dubai, Ukraine, and a few I’ve made myself, either entirely by hand or with my Cricut stencil-maker machine.

I’ve always loved patterns. In my Persian heritage, patterns are a way of telling stories without words, passed down through generations. In technology, especially in artificial intelligence, patterns are how the computer “learns” by noticing shapes, colors, or details that repeat, and then connecting them.

In a way, AI learns from patterns the same way we do when we recognize a face or remember a melody. That’s why I fill my art with them: not just to honor the cultures they come from, but because I want these shapes, these ancient, meaningful designs, to be remembered by AI itself, carried forward into the future alongside our human memories.

She Models, A woman’s profile blooms with circuitry, honoring my daughter and new granddaughter, their generation building the AI of tomorrow.

AI, at its core, learns from examples called training data in much the same way people learn from experience. Feed it enough songs, stories, images, or maps and it begins spotting patterns and making connections. Those patterns become its internal map, guiding how it understands the world and how it creates.

What makes AI transformative is its ability to adapt, reusing what it has learned in new contexts, like a vine finding new paths to grow, weaving through different landscapes while still rooted in the same soil. This adaptability is changing fields from medicine to media.

I don’t paint robots or copy AI-generated images. What inspires me are the ideas behind how AI learns and connects information and I translate those concepts into shapes you can see. Some layers are flowers, some are patterns from circuit boards, and some are geometric shapes that hold everything together. I’ll even use AI as a quiet studio assistant: sometimes helping me brainstorm captions, other times looking at a photo of my painting-in-progress and suggesting an unexpected pattern or motif to add.

In a finished piece, a human face might be traced with gold circuit lines, a meeting place where heritage and technology share the same space, not as strangers, but as if they’ve been in quiet conversation for centuries, trading stories, exchanging patterns, and growing side by side.

Just as each layer in my work carries meaning, so does its final mark. Every painting leaves my studio with a small but significant signature: a wax seal pressed into one corner of the canvas. Sometimes it bears the single letter A, for Ardalan. Other times it reads AI, a playful double meaning for Ardalan, Iran and artificial intelligence.

For me, it is more than a stamp of authorship, it’s a bridge between my identity, my heritage, and the technology that inspires me. And it feels fitting, because we are entering an era where this exchange is no longer abstract: where a chatbot might read Emily Dickinson or Rumi aloud to an elder, where families might cook meatloaf or tahdig from recipes stored in their digital archives, at its best, it can help us keep our memories alive in ways once unimaginable.

An ancient guard stands watch, draped in chains of binary, ones and zeros, cascading like an unbroken script. Behind him, Persian tilework merges with circuitry, forming a lattice that protects both stone and story.

This is the same philosophy I explored in my book AI for Community: technology should help preserve culture, not erase it. In my paintings, that belief is expressed in brushstrokes, colors, and the meeting of ancient motifs with contemporary ideas — as natural to me as the meeting of tide and shore here in Annapolis.

This is We See You, a single, steady white eye hovers in a deep blue expanse, tethered by a ribbon of golden circuitry. A symbol of vigilance, memory, and the unseen networks that need to safeguard our stories.

In my decades as a journalist, from National Geographic to public media, I worked in words, images, and sound, shaping stories for specific platforms. That was the era of fixed content: a print spread, a radio segment, a documentary frame.

Now, my art explores what is called “liquid content” — the next generation of storytelling. It’s information that can move between mediums and formats, reshaping itself while preserving its core meaning. Like water poured into a new vessel, it adapts to fit its context without losing its essence.

This fluidity feels personal to me: I grew up in a family of artists, but it was my friend and artist Parinaz Bahadori, whose collage practice, in particular, opened the door to art in my own life.

Bagh of Code: Framed in weathered Maryland barn wood, a Persian courtyard unfolds in cobalt and gold. Floral stencils form a living archive, while circuitry threads between them like channels for liquid content, information able to shift form while keeping its essence. Local wood and ancient patterns meet at a perfect crossroads, like Chesapeake tides carrying memory between shores.

I am inspired by the anonymous artisans of 13th-century Persia, who used hand-cut stencils to create breathtaking patterns centuries before modern mathematics could name their geometry in order to turn the complex systems of our own time into something you can see and touch, and because my imagination drives me to.

In the end, my work is about connection: between mother, daughter, and granddaughter; between the stone carvers of Persepolis and the coders of today; between the salt air of Annapolis and the datasets of my dreams. Every bridge I build holds a part of my own story, a thread of family, a fragment of heritage, so the future we create is not just shared, but deeply human.

Editorial note: I used AI to help shape and refine this blog, collaborating with a language model to enhance flow, clarity, and tone.