Lonnaigh do Sholas: Projection Mapping the GPO for Dublin Winter Lights 2025 - Why We Made It Without any AI
Solasine · Dublin, Ireland
In December 2025, we projected a thousand years of Irish history onto the façade of the GPO on O'Connell Street. Not one frame of it was generated by AI. This is how and why we did it...
Where it began
Every studio has a project that helps define who they are. For us it was Dublin Winter Lights 2025, the Dublin City Council festival that ran from 1–31 December 2025 across 25 city-centre locations, from Dublin Castle and Merrion Square to Wolfe Tone Square and the banks of the Liffey.
We were one of eight artists and studios selected to transform the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, a full digital projection across the building's façade, built to the festival's theme of Liberation.
There is no neutral building in Dublin, but the GPO is less neutral than most. Projecting onto it means projecting onto the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising and we took that seriously.
The piece: 'Lonnaigh do Sholas' — 'Shine Your Light'
Lonnaigh do Sholas is a condensed reflection on Irish history: This piece tells a story that mirrors Ireland’s enduring journey toward liberation through a condensed reflection on Irish history, from Neolithic age myths and ancient folklore through to the struggle for independence, and into the modern era.
It celebrates the courage of the human spirit and the power of embracing one’s inner beauty. Ireland’s seasonal legends remind us that time and circumstance are ever-changing, shaped by colonisation, conflict, love, and loss the true constant lies in self-empowerment and self-love.
This evolves into guardianship for the natural world, inspiring a collective liberation that carries into a future shaped by creativity, innovation, and pride in both self and community.
The work pays homage to the 1916 Easter Rising, featuring narration inspired by James Connolly. The accompanying music uses the Morse code rhythm transmitted for The Wireless School of Telegraphy on O’Connell Street. This was Ireland’s first radio broadcast and proclaimed the Irish Republic to the world.
Credits: Joey Baker — Director & Lead Animator · Conan Wynne — Animator & Composer · Gerry Wynne — Narration · Nial Woods — Violin
Behind the scenes
Talented videographer Pedro Giaquinto put together a behind-the-scenes film covering the workflow. Visit his website here: giahomemade.com
Why there is no AI in this project
We made a decision at the start of production and held it to the last render: no generative AI anywhere in the pipeline. No AI-generated visuals. No AI-generated music. No AI voice. No AI upscaling, in-betweening or style transfer. It was not a marketing campaign... It came from three things.
1. The subject deserved authorship.
You cannot make work about people who risked everything for self-determination and then outsource the authorship of it to machines that scrape human creativity for profit. The piece argues for human courage and self-empowerment, producing it by prompt would have contradicted the very message we were trying to portray.
2. Craft carries information that generative art cannot.
A human animated sequence encodes decisions, everything within the production has been chosen to add or takeaway from a scene, what is withheld and when a beat lands. Every frame in Lonnaigh do Sholas was modelled, textured, lit, animated and mapped by humans using our own 3D pipelines with hundreds of hidden details still yet to be discovered.
3. Artists are losing their livelyhoods
As practicing artists we know... it has always been hard to maintain your craft, but over the last couple of years that has become even harder with the automation and depreciation of our creativity driving us further away from collaboration. One of the key sectors hit here is the music industry. The score we made was a live violin performance by Nial Woods alongside the estoic narrative voice of Gerry Wynne to the rhythm taken from a real historical transmission. Generated audio would have been faster but would have meant nothing, as there is such a difference between a piece of music that references 1916 and a piece of art that is composed from it, crafted by humans of raw emotion.
We are not interested in a purity contest, and we are not against technology as we work with cutting edge tech in real-time 3D, AR and motion tracking every week. The line we draw is more basic, its about preserving human culture... when you commission Solasine you are investing in a circular economy within the creative arts.
What we took from it
Dublin Winter Lights gave us a 31- night run in front of hundreds of thousands of people on one of the busiest streets in the country on a building everyone in Ireland knows about. It has set the standard we have worked to since, across immersive experiences, interactive installations, projection mapping, augmented reality and real-time 3D VJ work for festivals, museums, brands and public spaces. However, the main thing we took from the production is that we are here to protect human creativity in maintaining and preserving human culture through the sponsorship of artistry within our productions.
This blog is where our work gets documented: project breakdowns, work-in-progress, technical notes from the studio, and the occasional argument about where immersive technology should and shouldn't go.
Start here, then keep an eye on this page. And if you have a building, a space or an idea that deserves more than a prompt — get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
Did Solasine use AI to make the Dublin Winter Lights projection?
No. Lonnaigh do Sholas was produced without generative AI at any stage - no AI-generated visuals, no AI-generated music, and no synthetic voice. All animation was created by hand, the violin was performed live by Nial Woods, and the narration was recorded by Gerry Wynne.
What was Solasine's piece at Dublin Winter Lights?
Lonnaigh do Sholas (Shine Your Light), a projection-mapped artwork on the facade of the GPO, O'Connell Street, Dublin, for Dublin City Council's Dublin Winter Lights 2025, created to the festival theme of Liberation.
What is projection mapping?
Projection mapping is a technique that aligns projected imagery to the exact three-dimensional geometry of a physical surface, typically a building facade, so that light appears to interact with the real architecture rather than sit flat on it.
Who is Solasine?
Solasine is a Dublin-based artist collective and multimedia design studio specialising in interactive installations, projection mapping, augmented reality and real-time 3D, with over 30 years of combined production knowledge across event, film, architecture and advertising.
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