I’m relentlessly fascinated by generative art, especially when it offers more than mere gawk-worthy code-slinging to instead enlist algorithms in telling a human story or making compelling social commentary. That’s exactly what artist Sergio Albiac does in Content Is Queen — a remarkable generative painting, using the most popular videos on the web at any given time to paint a portrait of the Queen, playing on the paradoxical duality of tension and interdependence between populism and monarchy. (Coincidentally, a fine complement to the Ralph Waldo Emerson line of thinking earlier today.)

[This project] 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, [it] is a paradoxical dialogue and strange marriage between the banal and the utterly majestic.” ~ Sergio Albiac

Albian uses an original technique he has developed, called “generative video painting.” Unlike previous takes on video collage, like David Hockney’s multi-POV collages or video mosaics like the recent GRAMMYs We’re All Fans project, Albiac’s approach uses selected regions of video content to “paint”” heterogeneous regions of the image, making both the partial content of the videos and the whole image fully visible at the same time.

via Etre