Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit
Fifty-six mosaics on one facade: how 3D projection mapping brought a forgotten chapter of Ukrainian modernism to life on the walls of Vienna's Leopold Museum.
Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit is an audiovisual media art conceived and directed by Tais Poda and produced by RocknLight studio (former THETA). The 3D mapping show was commissioned by the Ukrainian Institute and became the centrepiece of Ukrainian Night Festival, held at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna in October 2019 as part of the Cultural Year #AustriaUkraine2019.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, Ukrainian artists created hundreds of monumental mosaics that decorated the facades, interiors, and public spaces of Soviet-era buildings across the country. Vibrant, formally bold, and deeply rooted in Ukrainian visual tradition, these works represented one of the most distinctive expressions of Ukrainian modernism — and for decades, they went largely unseen by the wider world. Photographer Yevhen Nikiforov spent years documenting them in his project Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics, creating an archive of images that became the foundation for Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit.
On the night of 3 October 2019, more than fifty of these mosaics were projected onto the facade of Vienna's Leopold Museum — one of Austria's most prestigious cultural institutions. The 3D mapping animation, created by Tais Poda and the media artists of RocknLight (former THETA), gave the flat photographic images a new, living dimension: tiles shifted, patterns breathed, and the geometry of each work responded to the architecture of the museum's facade. The music of Ukrainian electroacoustic collective Ptakh Jung accompanied the show, weaving together sound and image into a single immersive experience.
Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit took on a deeper resonance after February 2022, when Russia's full-scale invasion began destroying the very mosaics the project had set out to celebrate.
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