Portraits of the British monarch are a famed part of their legacy and an established PR practice, from Henry VIII’s stern face and quadratic wall of a body, leaving behind an impression of a man not to be messed with (or married to), to Elizabeth I and her snow-white face gazing out upon the plebeians with less emotion than a frozen shark. One of the unifying themes among most portraiture of kings and queens throughout the ages (other than their distant, indifferent expressions) is that most of the portraits have been painted or photographed, including those of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. Never one to truly embrace the modern world after about 1955, it would be a great shock if she suddenly started using AR or commissioned collaboratively sketched portraits via Mechanical Turk.While modern technology is rarely used in this bastion of tradition, there have been some unconventional portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, both by royal appointment and otherwise. From famous artists like George Condo, Lucian Freud, Justin Mortimer, and Jamie Reid‘s famous cover for the Sex Pistol’s God Save the Queen have all tried their hand at subverting or sabotaging the usual flattering, respectful portrait. It’s in this noble tradition that artist Sergio Albiac (whose “You Are Not The News” generative portraits we’ve previously covered) has created his generative portrait of the queen, Content is Queen. Part of a series that “reflects on the foundations of democracy against the resilient nature of structures of power”, using a technique he’s called "generative video painting," Albiac mixes the distinguished with the lowly (well, to Her Majesty anyway). The portrait is painted using composite footage from the most popular internet videos of a given moment—the video above shows several attempts at different points during a single day—using them as a visual input, their tones, forms, and colors become a swarming, glitchy mosaic of HRM.Albaic explains the process: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.So the democratic entertainments of the day give form to the sovereign ruler where, with an ironic twist, one of the most frivolous and ubiquitous forms of media, the internet video, is used to create a portrait of someone who is rarely seen in public, has probably never heard of a LOLcat, and has been head of state for 59 years.[via Triangulation blog]
Advertisement