On Halloween night, The Natural History Museum transformed the exterior of a historic church on Vashon Island, Washington, into a giant animated canvas, with ghostly figures and Halloween imagery moving across the building’s architecture. The installation marked our first public experiment with projection mapping—a medium we’re exploring for site-specific public art and environmental and social justice storytelling.
Immersive storytelling has long been part of NHM’s practice. Our touring exhibition Whale People: Protectors of the Sea, for example, featured a seven-channel panoramic film installation that immersed visitors in documentary footage and stories narrated by Indigenous elders. Projection mapping offers new possibilities for bringing immersive storytelling into public space, using buildings and landscapes not simply as projection surfaces, but as sites whose histories and meanings inform the work itself.
We’re especially interested in the potential to make visible the relationships between past and present, land and power, and historical events and contemporary struggles. Imagine an industrial facility, corporate headquarters, or contested landscape animated by the histories embedded in that place—the forces that shaped it, the communities affected, and the struggles unfolding there today.
Co-produced with community groups, these site-specific projections could transform familiar places into platforms for community memory, testimony, and counter-narratives—and gathering places for collective action.
Our Halloween installation was a first opportunity to test the technology at architectural scale and experiment with how moving images interact with a physical site. We’re excited to build on this experiment and explore what’s possible in collaboration with communities leading struggles to reclaim their histories, defend their rights, and shape their futures.
Special thanks to 4Culture for their support, to Vashon United Methodist Church and Mind Set Apothecary for hosting us, and to everyone who came out!
