Since 2019, Sheung Yiu has been working with Finnish remote sensing researchers — following them on field trips to forest plots, and interviewing them about their 'forest reflectance model' and the datasets they use to construct it.

Researchers use this model to look into how light enters the forest and reflects back to satellites, to retrieve information about the landscape beyond what is visible on the image.

In this Screen Walk, the artist took the audience on a desktop tour through folders of scientists' datasets. Interweaving archives, photographic artworks, and exhibition documentation, the talk explored how to see the invisible, while reflecting on a computer-aided vision that is becoming ever more abstract.

Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Biography

Sheung Yiu is a Hong-Kong-born, image-centered artist and researcher, based in Helsinki. His artwork explores the act of seeing through algorithmic models and sense-making through networks of images. His research interests concern the increasing complexity and agency of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in contemporary digital culture. He looks at photography through the lens of new media, scales, and network thinking. Adopting multi-disciplinary collaboration as a mode of research, his works examine the poetics and politics of CGI, such as computer vision, computer graphics, and remote sensing, to understand how to see something where there is nothing, how to digitize light and how vision is programmed. Yiu’s work takes the form of photography, videos, photo-objects, exhibition installations and bookmaking. Sheung Yiu is a doctoral candidate in Photography at Aalto University.