Sergio Albiac Paints Portraits Using Your Video Memories

Portraiture has been around for a little while—say, the odd 5,000 years or so—and during the years it’s been transformed by the technologies of the day, taking shape according to the forms and practices of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and film. So in a world where art is now being generated using machines and algorithms, it’s only natural that these same code-based practices should take on the creative act of capturing a person’s likeness, mood, and personality.

Artist Sergio Albiac has been exploring the idea of generative portraits for some time, creating still images of his subjects from randomized newspaper clippings, then moving on to moving image portraits where he used internet videos to generate a video painting of the Queen of England.

His latest project has upped the ante on all levels. Albaic explains: “With this new work, I tried to create a new type of portrait, one that goes beyond physical appearances—[one that’s] more ‘realistic’ as it renders the founding blocks of the intimate world: your memories, your relationships and your emotions.” The piece, called Videorative Portrait of Randall Okita is both a video and an installation, and is created using his generative painting techniques.

Rather than use found internet videos as in his previous project, Albiac portrays the personality of the subject using personal videos he collected from him, tagged with relevant concepts, emotions and descriptions. A portrait is then painted digitally using custom tools and Processing, GSVideo, plus generativedesign and controlP5 libraries.

With the help of this new technique, the portrait is given greater emotional depth. A shifting collage of video memories flickers across the subject’s face, the alternating videos building a living portrait of the person, creating a sensation as if their intimate thoughts and memories are being projected out onto their countenance. “I’ve tried to condense several metaphorical layers in a work that required me to develop a whole new application to ‘paint with meanings’ instead of colours,” the artist said.

In the interactive installation people can journey through the subject’s mind, finding connections between the video memories. The piece is also “alive” in the sense that more videos, tags and descriptions can be added to it to over time, so this living portrait’s memory can grow.

“It is also a metaphor of the art of traditional painting,” says Albaic “but expressed in contemporary media: generative video and interactive installation. It is an evolutive type of portrait that can be fed with more video memories, increasing ‘likeness’ as time goes by. Also, it is a kind of ‘data visualization’ of the emotional life: the installation version of the work uses online access to Wikipedia to infer emotions tied to your memories and displays new and ‘subconscious’ interpretations of the person portrayed.”