Hasta La Ideas

You all remember “Operator,” the party game where you whisper something in one person’s ear, they whisper it into the next person’s ear, and so on around the circle, and by the time you get to the 20th person the message has been distorted beyond recognition? Well, here we have something like “Operator” in drawing form.

Brooklyn-based multicreative* Clement Valla’s project, “A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals,” started off with a guy drawing a straight line. Then someone traced it, and the following 498 participants all traced their predecessor’s line. And even though the second guy traces like an idiot, by the time you get to the end the result is almost unbelievable:

*Why do I refer to Valla as a multicreative? Check out his bio:

After working as an architect and designer in the USA, France, and China, Clement Valla began using computers and digital technologies to explore formal, mathematical, linguistic and social systems. He studied the intersection between art and computer programming at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Digital+Media MFA program, focusing on issues of individual and massively collaborative authorship, and generative algorithms applied to systems of reproduction. He is interested in processes that produce unfamiliar artifacts and skew reality. Valla works within systems, applying a ‘programmed brain’ that pushes problem-solving logic to irrational ends.

Love to see this guy at a cocktail party when someone rolls up and says “So, what do you do?”

Anyways, if you think the line is bugged out, hit the jump to see “A Sequence of Circles Traced by Five Hundred Individuals.”

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