Rural Mapping – Projection Mapping in Public and Natural Space
July 22, 2026
Projection mapping is almost always associated with a big-city context — illuminating a historic tenement building, a museum facade, a town hall wall. "Rural Mapping" is our series of installations that deliberately flips that context: it moves the same technique into Polish rural space — barns, cottage interiors, farmyards — places where real-time technology meets an aesthetic completely different from the urban one.
What this project is about
Rural Mapping combines three elements: professional local video footage shot directly in the given space, a real-time environment built in Unreal Engine 5, and procedural post-processing that builds a coherent, nostalgic visual mood. Together they form a multimedia installation embedded in its natural, rural surroundings — not detached from them.
The production process runs in three steps:
- Video footage — capturing the space in its natural state, the starting point for the whole production.
- Post-processing — procedural treatment of the footage that builds a nostalgic atmosphere and a coherent visual language.
- Projection mapping — the final projection returns to the place it came from, closing the narrative loop.
That last principle — the image literally returning to where it came from — is the heart of the whole project: this isn't generic animation pasted onto any available surface, but content built from a scan and footage recorded in that exact location.
Why natural, public space is a different challenge than a city building
A barn or timber farm building has completely different properties from a plastered facade: irregular texture, natural warping of the structure, material sensitive to intervention. The projection has to be designed to work with those properties, not against them — which is why an accurate scan of the object's geometry before any animation work is so important. More on why this method is also safe for protected heritage buildings — in our article on projection mapping on historic facades.
We cover the full production pipeline — from capture to premiere — in more depth in the article "Projection Mapping Step by Step", and a general explanation of the technique itself in "What Is Projection Mapping".
Full visual documentation of the project is available on the Rural Mapping project page.