In 2023, the Finnish publisher Eriskay Connection released Sheung Yiu’s “Everything Is a Projection,” a 304-page softcover book that began with a constraint familiar to many: a desk during quarantine. From that fixed position, Yiu digitised 81 household objects into 3D models, applying a computer-graphics technique called projective texturing to rebuild his immediate surroundings as a navigable virtual space. The resulting dataset, assembled from everyday things, is less a diary than an archaeological site of daily life.
The book’s subject is not photography in the conventional sense but the systems that underpin it. In the pipelines of 3D graphics, photographs function as raw data: texture, normal, and UV maps that describe how surfaces reflect light, instructing a rendering engine to calculate pixel values until the resulting image looks convincing to a human eye. Yiu gathers these maps and models extensively in the book, exposing the mechanisms by which virtual reality and gaming construct their worlds.
An interview with Jaakko Lehtinen, head researcher at NVIDIA, extends the inquiry into the technical and conceptual stakes of computer-generated images. Text editing is by Hanan Mahbouba; Emery Norton designed the volume. The book is in English, measures 17 by 24 centimetres, and is printed and bound by Wilco Art Books in the Netherlands. It is also a work of collaboration: concept and photography are Yiu’s, supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and WMA Hong Kong.
For collectors drawn to photography that questions its own conditions, this book is a considered example. Rather than treating the photograph as an endpoint, it shows photographic data being repurposed, and it records that transformation at the scale of an ordinary desk. The result belongs to a line of practice concerned with how images operate inside emerging visual systems, and it makes that argument through materials as much as through text.
