Painting a Videorative portrait (a generative, narrative and interactive video portrait) starts with collecting personal videos of the person portrayed, tagged by him/her with relevant concepts and descriptions. Then, using a custom-developed tool, the artist "paints with meanings" and generates a video portrait, subtitled with generative personal narratives. In the interactive installation version of the work, the viewer can "navigate" through the subject's mind, opening his/her video memories, accessing their thoughts and revealing hidden connections between the meanings, using real-time access to Wikipedia to infer related emotional states. These "data visualizations" create new and unexpected interpretations of the portrait.
The subject portrayed can add more video memories, tags and descriptions to “increase the likeness” of the portrait over time, all his/her life, creating a never-ending collection of personal documentaries.
Videorative portraits are the result of my experiments to build a more “realistic” contemporary portrait of the physical and the psychological. A comment on the art of portrait painting. A visual metaphor of the memory, heavily distorted, chaotic, fragmented, and obsessively replayed. A window to the subject's personal experience and intimate world. A picture of memories. A map of emotions.
Below portrait of filmmaker Randall Okita, Marilyn Monroe and the Queen.
Credits for Randall Okita:
All video sources, by Randall Okita (randallokita.com)
Music: "I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor", by Chris Zabriskie. (chriszabriskie.com)
Made with Processing, using GSVideo, generative design and controlP5 libraries.
