Clement Valla
Clement Valla is an artist who explores the intricate relationship between humans and computers in the creation and interpretation of images. His art has been featured in solo exhibitions at bitforms gallery, Art Macau, Istanbul Contemporary, PC Galleries, XPO Gallery and Transfer Gallery. His work has also been exhibited at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), Seoul, South Korea; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, Germany; MU, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Breda, The Netherlands; Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, France; the ICA, London, United Kingdom; The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; and Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY.
His work has been cited in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, El Pais, Huffington Post, Rhizome, Domus, Wired, The Brooklyn Rail, Liberation and on BBC television. Valla received a BA in Architecture from Columbia University and an MFA in Digital + Media from RISD. He is currently a professor at RISD.
Academic areas of interest
Valla writes instructions and computer code in order to explore systems. His programs are generative. They rely on chance, randomness, repetition and recombination in order to produce complex and unexpected images that lie on the boundary between nature and artifice. He finds systems that produce unintended artifacts, unexplored juxtapositions. Glitches, not designed effects. He collects these strange occurrences.
Valla explores an authorless world at the intersection of human labor and digitized systems, a blurred boundary between human creativity and machine intelligence where computers are built to think increasingly like humans and where humans act like computers, and uses them as metaphors for looking at nature and humanity. In this ambiguous territory, he plays notions of the hand-made, the mechanical, the natural and the systematic off of one another.