Valentin Jadot
Overview
Valentin Jadot is a Belgian artist and programmer based in Mexico City. He builds interactive systems out of data, archives, and machine learning: installations for galleries and museums, and software for artists, museums, brands, and startups. The work keeps returning to migration, surveillance, historical memory, and financial systems. He came to it from law and economics, and taught himself to program.
Studio
señal studio is the creative technology studio Valentin co-founded in 2026 with the animator Camila Anaïs and the artist Diego Trujillo Pisanty. See senal.studio.
señal is transdisciplinary, and works with artists, designers, scientists, and programmers on each project. Its work falls into four areas: interfaces, narrative and movement, physical systems, and generative AI.
señal studio is based in Santiago, Mexico City, and Barcelona.
Background
Born in Liège, Valentin has lived in Brussels, Guangzhou, Santiago de Chile, and now works from Mexico City.
His first jobs were in finance and regulation: digital strategy for a private bank, then risk models at Belgium's Financial Services and Market Authority.
In 2019 he joined Fintual, a Y Combinator fintech in Chile, and spent five years there across software development, growth, and branding, working on the company's apps, architecture, and design system.
He has kept an art practice since 2023 and worked independently since 2024, on commission for museums, journalists, artists, and startups.
Education
Valentin holds a Master of Laws from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a Master in Economics from the Université catholique de Louvain, both magna cum laude, both finished in 2016.
Work
Art and installations
The White House (2025)
A robotic installation about United States deportation policy, made with the DATA collective (Departamento de Análisis y Tratamiento Avanzado: Juan Carlos León, Valentin Jadot, Felipe Brugués) and shown at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Quito for the BUAC Media Art Biennial.
Visitors enter a white clinical room. Every two minutes a robotic arm fires one orange shot, one per person expelled, on its way to 21,744 of them: the monthly average of deportations under the Biden administration in 2024. The marks accumulate on the floor. A facial recognition system watches the room and sorts visitors by risk, in the manner of Palantir or Babel Street.
Valentin worked on the electronics, the software, and the systems behind the firing mechanism, the live data visualization, the facial recognition, and the interaction design. The work won the Cuarto Premio Q Galería in Quito, which comes with a solo exhibition of new work at the gallery.
DATA was nominated for CIFO-Ars Electronica Award, cycle 2027.
Track II (2024–2025)
An installation on the 1973 Chilean coup and United States intervention in Latin America, made with Daniela Contreras for Interweaving the Archive at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, 8 to 30 November 2024.
Contreras wove a paper tapestry out of declassified documents and Salvador Allende's last words. Valentin built the machine beside it: visitors scanned a QR code to put questions to a simulated Henry Kissinger, grounded in the same archives, and the answers printed live on thermal paper. See track-two.app and SOIL Gallery.
interfaz.cloud (2024)
A web piece for Alfanumerico, an album by the Chilean band Ángel de la Guarda. Drone photogrammetry becomes a world of point clouds that the visitor's body pulls apart as they move, and that disintegrates as it plays, after William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. Nominated at the Juan Downey International Media and Audiovisual Arts Competition in 2024. See interfaz.cloud.
Software and platforms
Maxxa (2026)
A new website for Maxxa, built with señal studio alongside Camila Anaïs and Javier Urbina, with Valentin on product and frontend. The old site had too many links, too many sections, and product names that managed to be inconsistent and cryptic at the same time. The work began with workshops to reorganize the content and tie each product to a problem a small business actually has, then carried Maxxa's brand book onto the web with the movement of energy as the through line. See gomaxxa.com.
Museo Interactivo Mirador (2025)
A full rebuild of the website of the Museo Interactivo Mirador in Santiago, with Gaggero Works on design and Valentin as lead developer, responsible for architecture, implementation, and migration. The site renders 3D in real time with Three.js and React Three Fiber. Valentin also made a creative coding piece for it, built on animated 3D typography. See mim.cl.
fintoc.me (2025)
The consumer personal finance app of Fintoc, a Y Combinator fintech, where Valentin was product manager and lead developer. He set the strategy, drew the wireframes, coordinated design, and led frontend, backend, and devops with one other developer. It shipped as an iOS and Android app with its own payment infrastructure, and he ran the launch, the marketing, and user support with the rest of the team.
boom.press (2024)
A publishing platform for journalism and multimedia work from across Latin America, on power, inequality, authoritarianism, environment, and democracy. Valentin built it with Gaggero Works, credited as "Gaggero Works & Valentin Jadot", and was responsible for architecture, frontend, and the creative coding pieces. See boom.press.
Colectiva Tramando (2023)
A platform for the Chilean feminist collective Colectiva Tramando, holding a body of work on dictatorship memory, human rights, and feminist resistance. Valentin did the technical development.
WhatsApp chatbot for education (2023)
An MVP chatbot for the education sector, made with the designer Cecilia Hevia. It runs on WhatsApp and uses AI to hold contextualized conversations with learners.
At Fintual
La FIN (2022)
Fintual's free intensive coding school in Patagonia, founded and run by Valentin. Ten students were taken from 1,010 applicants across Latin America. Alumni went on to work at Fintual, found companies, and teach. The school became part of Fintual's brand and a reference point in Chilean coding and startup culture.
La Ruta Fintual (2021)
A recruiting trip across Chile by motorbike. Two months and $5,000 brought in four developers and more than fifteen press articles.
Early work
Respublicae (2011–2016)
A non-profit democracy platform Valentin built for the Université Libre de Bruxelles, started when he was 21 and financed by the university dean. More than 25,000 people used it. It was where he learned to build software and run a project.
Talks and panels
Contemporary Art & AI, OpenAI AI Summit Mexico (2025)
Valentin curated and moderated the Contemporary Art & AI panel at the OpenAI AI Summit in Mexico City, organized by OpenAI and Fintual. He selected and invited three Latin American artists, Amor Muñoz, Diego Trujillo Pisanty, and Felipe Rivas San Martín, opened the session, and joined the conversation on stage. Watch the panel.
Te pago en 2030 (2025)
A talk on the future of payment infrastructure in Chile, on the main stage of the Chile Fintech Forum in Santiago.
Indie Talks: Historias atípicas (2025)
A talk at the indies.cl meetup in Santiago, on the path from law into programming and then into media art.
Skills
- Art and technology: interactive installations, computer vision, light robotics, 3D, data art, AI
- Frontend: TypeScript, React, Next.js, WebGL, Three.js, React Three Fiber, React Native, Vue, p5.js, GSAP, Lenis, PixiJS, Tailwind, shadcn/ui
- Backend: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, LangChain, RAG systems, Supabase, Prisma
- Infrastructure: Railway, Vercel, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Bun
- Also: branding, growth hacking, product management
His method is to break things, tweak them, and rebuild, and to keep the accidents worth keeping.
Languages
French (native), Spanish (advanced), English (advanced).
Contact
- Email: valentinjadot@gmail.com
- Site: valentinjadot.com
- Studio: senal.studio
- Instagram: @valentinjadot
- GitHub: /valentinjadot