Spotting A Tree From A Pixel (With Remote Sensing Researchers)
(2022)
author(s): Sheung Yiu
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition contemplates the collaboration between me, a photographer, and remote sensing researchers from the Department of Geoinformatics at Aalto University, in an ongoing artistic research collaboration called Ground Truth. Ground Truth is a photography project about ‘seeing something when there’s nothing there’. Based in the research group’s initial intent to overcome the spatial resolution limits of satellite imagery, the project now investigates new imaging techniques such as computational photography and hyperspectral imaging of forests, while also referencing photography’s love affair with natural landscapes. Such a comparative approach to natural photography has allowed me to offer a vision that typically escapes human sight perception.
I open this auto-theoretical text with a personal experience, namely being on a field trip with remote sensing scientist Daniel Schraik. I use this moment to, among other things, articulate my thoughts on the construction of the ‘real’ in different disciplines. I then contemplate the body of interviews and field trips that became a two-year-long interdisciplinary dialogue, and also brought together two distinct ways of looking at the forest: one symbolized by the camera, another by the terrestrial laser scanner. Inspired by remote sensing concepts such as ground truth and the inverse problem, I have come to examine photography through a new analytical framework.
In everyday language, the term ‘ground truth’ refers, in part, to a first-hand experience. In our project, it makes sense, then, that Ground Truth connotes the documentary tradition and the act of witnessing. In the language of science, however, and specifically in remote sensing as a field, ground truth means something different. It refers to data collected on-site, which can then be used to calibrate, to build models, to predict, to interpret, and to decipher information from images; in this case, satellite images. Similarly, our interdisciplinary collaboration functions on another operational layer of photography beneath the immediately visible, one that illustrates an expanded notion of photography across contemporary discourse. Ground Truth interweaves archival imagery, documentary photography, experiment dataset, 3D digital art and conceptual photography. The constellation of employed elements contrasts the representational approaches of drawing and photography with the data-oriented and algorithmic approaches of computer-aided seeing. The two modes together allow for a parallel reading of the forest — one that contextualizes different epistemological regimes that allow for new configurations of the relationship between image and reality.
ESP Duos: Imagined Co-Presence in Remote Improvisation
(last edited: 2026)
author(s): IRK
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition presents the audio recordings produced within the ESP Duos project, a series of remote improvisations performed by long-term collaborators under conditions of complete acoustic and visual separation. Each duo was recorded simultaneously in isolated spaces, without any form of real-time interaction, and later combined into a single auditory perspective available only to the listener.
Rather than testing whether musical interaction can be sustained at a distance, the project explores how residual traces of collaboration continue to shape improvisatory behavior when the other performer is imagined rather than perceived. The recordings foreground imagined co-presence as an enacted orientation grounded in embodied memory, shared history, and relational expectation.
As artistic outputs, the ESP Duos invite listening not for coordination or synchronization, but for emergent coherence arising from contingency, alignment, divergence, and retrospective sense-making. The exposition situates these recordings as both documents of a research process and autonomous aesthetic artifacts, offering access to a mode of togetherness that persists beyond physical co-presence.