Clement Valla
Clement Valla works with the logic of image-making systems. He is best known for Postcards from Google Earth, which collects the melting bridges, draping highways, and folded terrain thrown off by Google’s automated 3D maps. The project surfaces images that an existing system already produces on its own. His pointcloud.garden and Google Trees projects work in the same direction, using the 3D scans and models these systems build to reconstruct the world. In each case the apparatus producing the picture is the subject.
Valla also writes his own instructions and code that set a rule in motion and let images emerge from it. His Seed Drawings begin with a single simple drawing that is copied by thousands of anonymous workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, each copying the previous drawing, until growth-like structures accumulate from purely local interactions that no single person designed. This side of his practice treats picture-making as a system to be authored rather than an existing one to be surfaced, and it is currently reemerging in new work.
His research considers how humans and machines have become entangled in making and reading pictures, starting from the observation that more images today are produced and parsed by computers than are seen by people. He is drawn to systems that throw off unintended artifacts, the glitches and ruptures rather than the designed results, and uses them to examine representation and the networks of labor that produce it. His recent work turns to the capacities that separate human makers from generative AI: sensibility, critique, intention, revision, and play.
Valla is the founding department head of Computation, Technology & Culture at RISD, the school’s first new undergraduate department in nearly 30 years, home to the Art & Computation BFA and the Sound BFA. He previously served as dean of Experimental and Foundation Studies. His teaching centers on process, systems, and design thinking, treating technology through the same lens: tools and methods to be understood, built, and worked through rather than simply used. He is represented by bitforms gallery, New York.
Selected exhibitions
Villa Massimo, Rome, Italy (2026)
Google Gradient Canopy, Mountain View, CA (2025)
V&A Dundee, Scotland (2024)
Art Macao: Macao International Art Biennale, Macao (2023)
Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), Seoul, South Korea (2021)
Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia (2019)
ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2019, 2015)
Stedelijk Museum, Breda, Netherlands (2017)
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, France (2016)
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, UK (2015)
Museum of the Moving Image, New York, NY (2013)
Solo exhibitions at bitforms gallery (New York and San Francisco), Contemporary Istanbul, Providence College Galleries, XPO Gallery (Paris), and Transfer Gallery (Brooklyn)
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.