The Real de San Carlos museum was designed as a complete multimedia experience — interactive displays, video projections, timeline installations, and cinematic mapping — built around one of Uruguay's most singular historical sites: a bullfighting arena where no bull, matador, or horse was ever killed.

Within that larger project, I was commissioned to develop a series of holographic display pieces projected onto real objects from the collection. Each piece had to activate a physical artifact — make it speak — without competing with it.

This one projects onto a real montera hat and explores the ritual dimension of bullfighting: the dressing room, the chapel, the superstition around the toss. The subject is intimate and visually specific. That specificity was the main production challenge.

Generating credible bullfighting imagery with AI is harder than it sounds. The iconography is precise and culturally loaded — a misplaced gesture, a wrong hold of the cape, an anachronistic detail, and the whole thing breaks. Getting the matador to work the capote rather than wave a generic piece of fabric took significant iteration, selection, and frame-level correction. Where AI couldn't deliver, I worked with processed real footage and integrated both sources into a single coherent visual language.

That consistency across sources was a deliberate choice. All three pieces in the series share the same dark palette, dramatic lighting, and centered composition — a unified aesthetic designed to work both as standalone displays and as a series.

Working from script and voiceover, I handled visual direction, AI-assisted generation, image curation, editing, graphics, animation, and adaptation for holographic projection.