Kizil Elma Curls is the virtual reflection of the earthly garden of paradise which the Ottoman House thought itself destined to create. The project takes its name from the mystical notion of Kizil Elma, meaning “red apple” in Turkish. Kizil Elma announces the establishment of the earthly paradise by the Ottomans before the advent of the apocalypse and becomes the name given to major European cities to conquer. According to the eschatological tradition, the world is to last for 7000 years and the Ottoman House is the ultimate culmination of about 6700 years of cosmic history starting from the Fall of Adam. It had the messianic mission to lead and unite the world during the last centuries of humankind. In this dynastic quest, Rome would become the Kizil Elma for Fatih Sultan Mehmed Khan, and Vienne, Buda and Esztergom for Suleyman the Magnificent. As part of the apocalyptical archival mission ordered by the court, these Kizil Elma cities are depicted meticulously by the Ottoman miniaturists. The Kizil Elma Curls experiment is based on such five miniatures, those of Vienne, Szekesfehervar, Buda(pest), Belgrade and Nicopolis.

Kizil Elma Curls confronts the Ottoman messianic urban miniatures with particle simulations that reveal the chromatic potential of pixels. Particles controlled by algorithms are tinted by the fantastical colours of the mineral pigments used by the miniaturists. The particle simulation represents a virtual reflection of an alchemical vision of space which the Ottomans inherited from the Timurids and mixed it with the Byzantine apophatic vision. It offers a transtemporal journey into the grand realm of colours depicting an otherworldly reflection of the natural world.

Each pixel of the digitized miniature emits hundreds of particles. The different paths that they follow are represented as undulating stripes in different colours. This network of bands expresses a key Sufi notion underlying the Constantinopolitan Eye: the unity of existence. They represent the different paths, destinies, journeys and meanings which coexist in the universe, all intertwined and rising from the same source, all radiating from the same image and made of the same building-block: the pixel.

The moving and evolving network of stripes forms a virtual scene where colours dance to depict the terrestrial adventure and cosmic destiny humankind. It is the reinterpretation of the Sufi metaphor of the chameleon used for describing the coexistence of contradictory realities and the constant transmutation of the universe.

The pseudo-random appearance of the particle system is the virtual echo of the Sufi notion of hayra, a mixture of perplexity and wonder. For the mystic, the complexity of the universe is beyond the limited human intellect and thus requires a state of confusion. In Kizil Elma, the algorithmic complexity and the rising “artificial aesthetics” become metaphors for the superhuman complexity of nature. This pseudo-random appearance is obtained by using a three-dimensional curl noise to define the movement of the particles. A derivative of Perlin noise, it is a mathematical function which gives values that only seem random yet are all calculations. This false randomness represents a complexity that escapes instant human comprehension. Kizil Elma Curls brings together two superhuman complexities, an imagined one through divine creation, and a second fabricated one through artificial intelligence. It questions the relationship between humankind’s first and contemporary superhuman creations, the gods and technology. Both are used either as a tool of power and domination or as a tool to achieve the earthly paradise.