Sponsored by the Ruettgers Grand Challenge Grant and Department of Visual Arts

Clement Valla is an artist interested in how machines and humans see. He works with scanners, satellites, cameras and software, leaves their workings in plain view, and draws by hand into what they produce. He is best known for Postcards from Google Earth (2010–ongoing), a collection of the melting bridges, draping highways and folded terrain thrown off by Google’s automated 3D maps. His recent work turns on the moment data becomes a surface. In pointcloud.garden, 3D scans of real gardens drift across screens as slow fields of points. In Google Trees, a scan of a single tree is printed onto folded steel and built at full scale. The work takes the form of prints, screens, textiles and sculpture.

His work has been exhibited at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; V&A Dundee; Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul; the Macao International Art Biennale; MU, Eindhoven; and the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. His projects have been covered by The Guardian, TIME, Wired, Artforum, El País, Domus and Smithsonian Magazine, among others.

Valla holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in Digital+Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is Professor and founding head of the Computation, Technology, and Culture department. He previously served as dean of Experimental and Foundation Studies. He is represented by bitforms gallery. Born 1979, he lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.