Fields of floating paper hiraganas hang to create colorful screens and passageways in this spectacular work of installation art. Designed by Emmanuelle Moureaux, it is part of a larger 100 Colors series exploring a whole spectrum of intimate and thoughtful spaces.

The opening of the exhibit coincided with Tanabata Day, a Japanese star festival during which people traditionally write down their hopes and dreams on pieces of paper then suspend these from bamboo branches.

The result is a peaceful place made up over of 140,00 paper cutouts, draped from the ceiling to create rainbow passages and aligned to create opportunities for connection as well as isolation throughout the artwork. From some perspectives, the entire spectrum is visible, while in other places, a single color dominates.

In Berlin, spanning the 450-foot length of the Brandenburg Gate where the former Wall divided the city, a kinetic installation ripples in the wind, bearing hand-written messages from city residents. Created by artist Patrick Shearn, “Visions in Motion” recognized the 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

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120,000 fabric streamers, 30,000 of them bearing notes, mimic the banners carried during demonstrations of the Peaceful Revolution, when hundreds of people came together to demand the reunification of Germany. Shearn, a resident of Berlin’s sister city Los Angeles, encouraged supporters in LA to participate by contributing their own messages, wishes and hopes for the future to the project.

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“In total, the installation is comprised of approximately 9500 linear ft. of rope, over 1250 hand-tied technical knots and approximately 120,000 ripstop nylon and reflective fabric streamers arranged in an elegant, colorful pattern. Harnessing available wind, the artwork will undulate in a gorgeous, immersive display… Patrick Shearn is particularly inspired to lend his work to this auspicious historical event and intends ‘Visions in Motion’ to be a symbol for peace and the united power of the people overcoming injustice.”

“‘As an artist, I am deeply moved by the invitation to translate such a watershed moment in human history into physical form,” says Shearn. “In light of the state of affairs in the world today, I feel it is a time to be bold, gather together with a unified voice, and throw our shared colors and our dreams skyward for the world to see.’”

The installation was in place from November 4-10 for Berlin Festival Week, when the city transformed “into a large open-air exhibition and event location” for official celebrations.

Artist Jenny Holzer is known for making public statements that can’t be ignored, and her latest project brings stark messages about gun violence to the facades of New York City’s Rockefeller Center. For “VIGIL,” a three-night installation that took place October 10-12, Holzer projected poems by teenagers impacted by school shootings, texts from the compilation “Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence” and stories from “Moments That Survive,” a collection by Everytown for Gun Safety.

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Presented in collaboration with the public arts organization Creative Time, “VIGIL” leaves onlookers no choice but to absorb and grapple with these messages and testimonies. The project aims to center the voices of those directly affected by gun violence, shifting away from using faceless statistics to emphasize the human toll.

“Projected onto one of the most iconic landmarks in New York City, VIGIL speaks to the massive impact gun violence has not only on individuals, but the very fabric of communities and cities,” reads Creative Time’s curatorial statement on the project. “The text encroaches on the facades and windows of these buildings, surrounding the viewer and enveloping the city in messages of light. Through the project, the city itself is transformed.”

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“The scrolling words of Holzer’s projections demand that the audience reads them. This strategy denies passive engagement, as viewers internalize these messages by hearing the text in their own voice. It is not possible to let these words just wash over. Since 1991, Holzer has used this technique to address such issues as domestic violence, war, and the corruption of power. Throughout her career, she has aimed to bring to light that which is hidden. In her ongoing project It Is Guns, trucks equipped with LED screens share pointed texts by the artist similarly addressing gun violence. Holzer expands upon these issues in VIGIL, magnifying her messages from the street to the cityscape.”

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See more photos of the installation at Gothamist.

Photos by Lauren Camarata

Famously beautiful ginkgo trees provide the raw materials for this falling leaf artist, which are carefully raked to create site-specific, all-natural art on the campus of Sacramento State University.

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Joanna Hedrick works at the school and has made these creations a kind of annual tradition,providing a backdrop for photos and a unique series of installation artworks for students — a great distraction right around finals time.

Using rakes, the artist creates complex maze, honeycomb, sunshine and other shapes, generally around a half-dozen per year. The idea is simple: take something already in place, then rearrange it to make something fun, interesting and a little different. Naturally, these works are eventually blown back into more abstract configurations, but that unraveling can be fascinating to watch, too.

In Japan, digital megaliths emerge from the floor of an abandoned bath house, coming alive with animated flowers and water in a beautiful mash-up of light art, projections and abandoned places. Multidisciplinary collective TeamLab designed the work to continuously render in real time, so it’s neither pre-recorded nor on a loop.

The concept of the project is that non-material digital technology, i.e. TeamLab’s illusory projections, can transform nature into art without harming it. While “Megaliths in the Bath House Ruins” inserts strange illusory structures into an abandoned space, “Graffiti Nature,” another exhibit in the show, imagines local endangered wildlife as living graffiti. As seen in the rest of TeamLab’s work, the projections are interactive, moving and changing according to the way visitors move, so the show is never exactly the same twice.

TeamLab speaks of the bath house and its forested surroundings in terms of “space-times,” exploring the relationship of this particular exhibit to its larger “A Forest Where Gods Live, Ruins and Heritage, The Nature of Time” show.

“The forest surrounding the bath house ruins is home to 3,000-year-old trees, and it changes daily with the imperceptible, slow flow of time, repeating every year, as a space where the endlessly long time accumulates. The ruins from ages past scattered in the forest and the Edo-period garden which remains today each have their own respective space-times. The bath house was made in modern times, but after just a short period, it was abandoned, becoming a space-time where time had stopped completely. And this group of megaliths is also a mass made up of compressed space-times where the flow of time varies. Here, various space-times intersect and overlap.”

“Each megalith is surrounded by similarly standing megaliths, the space-times of which are all connected. Furthermore, these space-times are connected to those of other megaliths distributed around the world. Artworks move between the megaliths, traveling between the nearby megaliths in the same space, as well as through the megaliths around the world. The works within the space-time influence each other.”

The show takes place at the 500,000-square-meter Mifuneyama Rakuen Park, which includes the famous 3,000-year-old sacred Okuso tree of the Takeo Shrine and another 300-year-old sacred tree located at the center of the garden. TeamLab is particularly interested in the vague boundaries between the manicured garden and the wild forest, and between our current time and the experiences of the people who have interacted with the space over millennia.

As with any TeamLab exhibit, there’s a lot to see here. Check out the video of “A Forest Where Gods Live” for digital projections onto natural spaces within the park, and head to the group’s website for lots more photos, videos and info.