“Content is Queen” is a video art series of generative portraits that reflects on the foundations of democracy against the resilient nature of structures of power. At the same time, is a paradoxical dialogue and strange marriage between the banal and the utterly majestic: to create the series, the most popular (in a truly democratic sense) internet videos of a given moment are used as the input of a generative process that “paints” with action the portrait of the Queen.

On a technical level, this piece is a result of my research in breaking the limitations of the static image in a contemporary revision of the tradition of painting. The portraits are created using a generative technique that I have developed called “generative video painting”. It differs of previous attempts of video collage (like the techniques developed by David Hockney, mixing simultaneous points of view of an action) or video mosaic (where still images are represented by whole videos acting as pixels when properly reduced in size). My technique uses regions of video content to effectively represent or “paint” heterogeneous regions of the image. Both the partial content of the videos and the whole image are fully visible at the same time, widening the possibilities to deliver meaning in a contemporary aesthetic language.

The generative process is implemented using Processing (processing.org).