Clement Valla is an artist who specializes in algorithm systems. His work Postcards from Google Earth shows snaps of our world seen through a computer. These pictures are twisted, deformed mainly because they were not taken by a human hand but by a computer as the artist explains it “they are created by an algorithm that finds nothing wrong in these moments. They are less a creation, than a kind of fact – a representation of the laws of the Universal Texture.” Filtered through the software’s lens, the surface is rendered smooth nothing comparable with a geological representation of the earth displaying its irregularities, due to the fact that Google earth uses 3D modeling which does not allow depth to appear as in a regular photograph. Consequently, perspective is not expressed in terms of explicit three-dimensionality but simply hinted at. It is the audience, who decodes the data they are given, they translate the pixels into an actual relief. This imbalance places us in a double-looking experience: “we are both looking at the distorted picture plane, and through the same picture plane at the space depicted in the texture. In other words, we are looking at two spaces simultaneously.” Clement Valla envisages his work as an opportunity to take hold of those images while they are still available, and this is what led him to consider himself “as a tourist in the temporal and virtual space – a space that exists digitally for a moment, and may perhaps never be reconstituted again by any computer.”

Written by Margeaux Villard