Penelope Umbrico is a Philadelphia-born visual artist. She is best known for her conceptual practice that interrogates the role and materiality of images in digital, consumerist and vernacular spheres. Her largely installation-based practice utilises found imagery and applied methods of appropriation, probing theoretical notions of authorship, authenticity and origin.

171 Clouds is the result of the first, site-specific commission of the Light Wall, a bank of screens in Phase One of the V&A Photography Centre that is dedicated to showing 'digital born', screen-based practices. Umbrico works mostly with images she finds on the internet, presenting them in ways that reveal the fluidity of digital photography. To create this video, she sifted through the V&A paintings collection online and extracted details of clouds. Like the barely noticeable movement of actual clouds on a still day, the images shift subtly from one to the next. The work explores the transition from fleeting clouds to material paint, and then from digital code to physical screen. For Umbrico, screens, like clouds, ‘are our background, our mood. They inform us and affect us in ways we are often not consciously aware of’.

Umbrico’s process involved cropping hi-resolution scans of paintings, importing them into video authoring software and applying slow dissolves between each image so that no image is fully viewable without another overlaid. She said: ‘I wanted to speak to the filtering properties of clouds as an analogy to the filtering properties of photographs and screens, so I applied the video authoring software’s pre-set ‘colorizing’ filters, weaving them in and out. The resulting pixelated clouds morph into one another, at times seeming completely abstract and ephemeral and at other times indisputably derived from online digital photographs of pain