Shadows of Persepolis
This Sunday at the Annapolis Arts Festival, I’ll be sharing a new series of acrylic paintings called Shadows of Persepolis, a visual exploration of how cultural memory, ancestral symbolism, and technology intertwine. These works invite a question I return to often: In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, what stories, and which patterns, will be remembered?
Several of the paintings I’ll be exhibiting center on figures I’ve come to call The Messengers. The process began with the background, layers of soft circuitry, fragments of binary code, and abstract data flows, forming a digital landscape. Over this, I placed the figures: noble, faceless forms in traditional attire, standing tall amidst cascading vines and intricate floral geometry. There’s a quiet dignity to these characters, not rulers, not heroic figures, but bearers of memory.
The contrast between the layered digital textures and this timeless presence became the heart of the pieces, a visual dialogue between ancestral wisdom and machine logic. To me, The Messengers represent the essential human stories that risk being overlooked in our rush toward the future. It’s a reminder that even in an AI-driven world, we must preserve the messengers of our past, those who carry the values, beauty, and truths that technology alone cannot create.
Patterns as Memory, Memory as Data
AI learns by recognizing patterns. As someone who has worked across journalism, public media, and now AI strategy, I often ask: What kinds of patterns are we giving AI to learn from?
This idea also lives in my recent book, AI for Community (Taylor & Francis, 2024), where I explore how we can create AI that reflects the values, identities, and heritage of the communities it serves. These paintings extend that inquiry in visual form.
Why Persepolis Still Matters
The series title, Shadows of Persepolis, is a tribute to the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, a place of visual power and philosophical purpose. Built to unify a vast and diverse empire, Persepolis was as much about diplomacy and design as it was about ritual.
In these paintings, I try to echo that balance: architecture meets algorithm, ritual meets code. The figures aren’t heroic symbols of conquest. They are guardians, archivists, and messengers, reaching through time and now standing within networks of data and AI. Their presence is a quiet insistence: that our technologies, no matter how advanced, must carry the stories of where we come from.
These works are layered, imperfect, and exploratory, much like memory itself. They are not conclusions, but starting points for conversation about how we honor the past while shaping the future. As AI continues to evolve, I hope we also evolve our commitment to embedding context into its foundations.
If you’re in Annapolis this Sunday, July 6, I’d love to share Shadows of Persepolis with you in person at Gallery 57 West. This event is part of the Annapolis Arts Festival First Sunday, and I’m honored to be participating as a member of the Annapolis Arts Alliance. Let’s talk about art, AI, heritage, and how we might build a future that remembers.
Davar Ardalan is an AI Strategist and artist with a rich media and tech background. She co-authored AI for Community, launched in 2025, and builds AIs for storytelling, engineering, and archives.
The Annapolis Arts Alliance is a nonprofit dedicated to supporting and promoting all forms of the arts in Annapolis, Maryland, and surrounding communities. We unite artists, patrons, and residents to celebrate and enrich lives through creative expression.
