Clement Valla – Tracing Lines

Artist Clement Valla takes inspiration from the simplest everyday tasks and makes artworks out of it. He asked 500 individuals via Amazon Mechanical Turk to trace a straight a line. Each new person can only see the latest line drawn, thus they can only trace the latest imperfect copy. It’s interesting to see as the line gets reproduced, it changes and transforms. Besides tracing straight lines, Valla also asked people to trace circles. The result is A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by 500 Individuals (shown in video above) and A Sequence of Circles Consecutively Traced by 500 Individuals.

Both projects, along with the rest of his work, is a part of Valla’s exploration on socio-technical systems. “My work focuses on socio-technical systems that raise a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. I explore digital technologies that are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things but that also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiple.”

In each project, every participant is paid $0.02 for their contribution. You can participate in Valla’s current project here.