Uly Dala Eli. Turkestan
Thousands of years of Kazakh Great Steppe history: how RocknLight helped to transform the galleries of the leading museum into a seamless immersive journey.
RocknLight was invited by Kazakh partners to oversee the curatorial and creative direction of the multimedia content for Uly Dala Eli, a museum and cultural centre in Turkistan, Kazakhstan, dedicated to the history and traditions of the Great Steppe. The studio produced video content for multiple spaces and developed the immersive show for the museum's centrepiece: a full-sphere projection hall.
Opened in Turkistan in 2020, Uly Dala Eli (the Country of the Great Steppe) is one of Kazakhstan's most technologically ambitious cultural institutions. Spanning two floors and an underground level, its galleries guide visitors through the full arc of Kazakh heritage: the metallurgy of the ancient steppe, the culture of horsemanship, the jewels of nomadic civilisation, the Kazakh Khanate, urban culture, and visions of the country's future.
RocknLight's task was to entwine the stories across each gallery into a single, coherent narrative, programming the museum's multimedia systems for a unified, one-button control solution. Working across the exhibition spaces, the studio produced video content for LED screens to accompany the museum's physical collections, as well as projections onto architectural models and display objects. These multimedia elements helped to bring life and visual dynamics to the stories about the displayed exhibits and historical artefacts. Working in museum environments demands a specific set of skills: an understanding of the process of collections' museification, curatorial expertise, and fluency in contemporary museum storytelling.
The most technically demanding element was the Turkish Hall — a spherical projection space fourteen metres high and eleven metres in radius, with a flat floor. To cover the entire surface of the sphere with a seamless image, RocknLight produced ultra-high-resolution video content in a lat-long format to be precisely mapped onto the spherical surface while preserving the laws of perspective. At the centre of the hall stood a kinetic crystal sphere that came into motion at the climax of the show, with its surface covered in projections and synchronised with the lighting show.
The result was a coherent exhibition in which every gallery, every screen, and every projection contributed to a single journey through the heritage and traditions of the Great Steppe, enhanced by contemporary multimedia solutions.
