Cities Are Projecting Their History Onto Streets and Buildings After Dark

When the sun goes down on the streets of Montreal, the city’s history comes to life.

The time-traveling tableaux of “Cité Mémoire,” a digital multimedia installation illustrating the moments that have shaped Montreal’s last 400 years, appear in alleyways and on industrial warehouses. More than 25 of the displays are scattered across Old Montreal, the Old Port and downtown like dreams that wake in the falling darkness every Friday and Saturday (and some Thursdays and Sundays).

“The idea was really to say, the people that live in the city, the people that built the city, maybe we still know their name or maybe not, but their soul is still in the brick of the walls,” says multidisciplinary Canadian artist Michel Lemieux, co-creator and producer of “Cité Mémoire.” The short re-enactments and interpretations of historical moments are like those souls “coming out of the wall to tell us a little story.”

Since debuting in 2016, Montreal’s “Cité Mémoire” has grown into the world’s most geographically expansive projection mapping installation. But the project is really very simple, Lemieux explains. “It’s not spectacular in the way of special effects,” he says. “It’s people, mostly on black background, and they enter in the light as if they are coming back to reality for a brief moment.”

Projected digitally onto existing features of the cityscape, the silent projections of “Cité Mémoire” move like slowly shifting paintings. An accompanying free phone app adds music and words to the visuals, telling the stories of events like the burning of the Parliament there in 1849, the debut of Canada’s first movie theater in 1907, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in for peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. But even without the app, the films are evocative enough to be understood through imagery alone.

“[Each video projection] takes six minutes or eight minutes, but it puts you into this slow time of our ancestors—and I think this taking time is what we need so badly in our lives,” Lemieux says.

It doesn’t matter where viewers have come from, whether they’re Quebecois and listening to the “Cité Mémoire” soundtrack in French or whether they’re from abroad, listening in Mandarin or Spanish, says Lemieux. The shared moments spent in front of the tableaux cross cultural barriers. “Everyone applauds together at the end,” he says.

That appetite for transcending the boundaries of time, for slowing down and looking back, seems only to be growing. Cities and historic sites are increasingly using digital projection mapping projects to make these journeys. Lemieux himself is working on a museum project, Mirror of Days, in which holograms will appear to give commentary on historical objects like a 1915-era typewriter, a sculpture of the Holy Family trapped in a rusty bird cage, and a World War I bayonet made from pencil lead, adding an intriguing new layer to the experience of viewing art, artifacts and antiquities.

Technologically speaking, digital projection mapping is relatively easy by today’s standards. It uses specialized software and a digital projector to beam video footage onto a contoured surface. Animated and warped, the images blend in ways that make it appear as if the surface itself, not just the visuals projected onto it, is moving dynamically in 3D.

The multidisciplinary art form was first developed more than 50 years ago at Disneyland, then one of the world’s best known hubs for animation innovation. Film of men singing the theme song of the Haunted Mansion, newly opened in 1969, was projected onto the “grim, grinning ghosts,” a collection of molded busts waiting at the ride’s end.

Disney filed the first official patent for “digitally painting” images onto “a contoured, three-dimensional object,” and, by the turn of the 21st century, both artists and academics were pushing the boundaries of what the technology could do. In one project from 1998, a team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill envisioned communicating with colleagues through virtual, life-sized, 3D doppelgangers that could be projected onto any office surface. In another from 2005, German computer scientist Oliver Bimber explored drapes, and even paintings, as projection screens.

Eventually, projection mapping graduated from brief interludes to full-scale storytelling. Most nights since 2014, a 24-minute public art installation called “The Saga” has been projected onto the facade of one of the oldest continuously operating churches in the United States, the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio. In the French Riviera, the technology has been used to tell the history of the Knights Templar, members of a secret society operating there in the 13th century. There, the tale was projected onto the tightly packed homes of the hillside community of Biot, which formed a monumental “screen” for viewers positioned below. Just this year, a new digital mapping projection, “Luz Cuenca,” was installed in the Spanish medieval city of Cuenca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The show transforms the interior of the San Miguel Church into a colorful, multisensory experience narrating the passage of time.

Though it’s already the nature of the projections to feel all-enveloping, pioneers in the field expect it will become only more immersive as digital mapping is combined with augmented and virtual reality, and integrated with real-time data that will transform viewers into active participants in the experience. An installation, for example, might allow viewers to make choices in the way a story unfolds—sort of a high-tech version of the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s and ’90s.

“This is a form of public art that’s definitely coming of age,” says Kimberly Van Driel, director of public space management at Michigan’s Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. (DGRI). The organization’s projection mapping show, “Motu Viget,” will become a permanent part of the city’s Lyon Square when its redesign is revealed next summer.

The nightly installation is the evolution of a temporary project, “Seasonal Wonders,” displayed in the same plaza when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down its streets. Back then, DGRI had to move equipment in to run the show, which highlighted the changing of the seasons in Grand Rapids and a little local history. The refurbished square will have permanent projection mapping infrastructure built right in.

“Motu Viget”—the city’s slogan, which means “strength in activity” in Latin—will illuminate the chronology of Grand Rapids, from its glacial formation to its first peoples to the more recent development of the city’s logging and furniture industries. Local artists will decide which stories to highlight in order to honor Grand Rapids’ past and present, and put them first in illustrated then in motion graphics form.

“No matter what, people are going to learn something [from the show] that they didn’t know before,” says Van Driel. “I think it’s important to continue to innovate and activate new spaces and create iconic infrastructure or art. Hopefully this will be another one of those staple installations, one of those pieces people really connect with when they think of Grand Rapids.”

“Cité Mémoire” is expanding, too, with new installations going up in several of Quebec’s cities. Last year, five tableaux were installed as part of “Cité Mémoire Charlevoix,” including one projected on a dramatic cliff overlooking the sea. The short films pay nightly tribute to the region’s unique past with scenes that include the dawn of its creation, a meeting between three pioneering local women at a restaurant and even an interactive vignette that allows visitors to ride logs down a river as timber-collectors did there in the 1930s. A “Cité Mémoire Quebec City” is coming soon.

“Every little gesture we can do in a city to add meaning [has a purpose],” says Lemieux. History isn’t just what happened in the past but the repercussions of the actions we take today inherited by future generations. A direct path runs from the Industrial Era to the tech revolution, for example, Lemieux explains. “It’s like we opened the tap and never closed it,” he says.

But by resurrecting stories from the past in the places they occurred, projection mapping prevents those older layers of time from disappearing into the now.

“When you walk in Montreal, all the time periods are side-by-side. Telling these little stories [are a way to] spark imagination and curiosity,” he says.