As public art interventions go, googly-eye additions to urban objects and surfaces are pretty simple to implement, effectively animating their surroundings without too much work (or risk of being caught).

Humans are naturally wired to read faces into ordinary things, but an extra cue or too by someone like Vanyu Krastev solidifies the effect, often with hilarious results.

Cracked bollards become crooked Pac Man-esque creatures and gaping water pipes seem to scream while doors and garbage cans gain strange sentience. The emotive range of these inanimate objects is quite impressive, considering it’s entirely in the eye of the viewer (and the two eyes placed on a given thing).

Eyebombing is nothing new (at least as old as the internet and probably as old as ‘googly eyes’ themselves), but always a fun way to lighten someone’s day as they pass by on the street. It’s also a form of expression anyone can engage in — very little skill or cash required.

It is “different from traditional types of street art like tagging, sticking, stencils” according to Eyebombing.com because “the above forms are largely driven by egocentric behaviour, like getting seen, respect and maybe a hope to get famous, often using vandalism as modus operandi.”

Take a seat, fasten your seatbelt and allow an usher to wheel you into a giant eyeball dangling outside of a building so you can take in all of the sights without anyone else present. The exhibit, entitled EYE, asks you to look first at the city, and then at yourself. Installed in five different buildings throughout the city of Den Bosch in Holland, the project by Belgian artists Pascal Leboucq and Lucas De Man features enlarged reproductions of the real pupils of local residents.

EYE is currently installed in a theater, a modern hospital, an old factory that’s about to be redeveloped, a monument and a corporate business. Billed as “an extraordinary audio-visual theatrical experience,” each eye seats one visitor at a time. After taking a seat and entering the eye, they’re invited to relax and take a look. Then, the guide asks them, “What do you see?”

“A city with eyes is a city that looks and shows itself,” says De Man. “No closed doors or shut windows, but open. We gave the city eyes so you can hang in the air above the world and look. Just look.”

The installation will remain in place until November 1st, with tickets available online, and will tour the world in 2015.

Unlike graffiti tags or other stylized and personalized approaches to urban art, eyebombing is an equalizer. Like a crowd behind Guy Fawkes masks, the work of any of the following 21 example ‘eyebombers’ is inherently anonymous due to the similarly simple materials used in each case.

Of course, the eyes just set the stage for further anthropomorphic interpretation ; with them in place, other street elements like grates, slots, posts and more suddenly become faces, mouths and limbs.

Context, with or without the intention of an artist, supplies emotion – even the most neutral eye placement makes for implied facial expressions of all kinds.

Per Eyebombing.com, these unsigned interventions are “different from traditional types of street art like tagging, sticking, stencils” because “the above forms are largely driven by egocentric behaviour, like getting seen, respect and maybe a hope to get famous, often using vandalism as modus operandi.”

Instead, they claim, it is about the message, the humor and simply brightening someone’s day. And while you can buy eyes from their site, they are also (again like a generic mask) available essentially anywhere and quite inexpensively, making this an easy art form to get involved with wherever you may be.

Photographers are the subject of a medium-old question: does their work represent reality, or create new realities? This one undoubtedly does both, putting images of eyes and faces up in urban spaces (streets, walls, even roofs) then recapturing them on film.

Their author, the anonymous JR, is a French artist who tackles tough subjects in difficult places, and has won a TED award for doing so. “In 2007, with Marco, he did Face 2 Face, the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the Security fence / Separation wall. The experts said it would be impossible. Still, he did it.”

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Featured here, however, are primarily his studies in Rio de Janeiro, which BldgBlog questions the purpose of: “are you visually transforming the ghetto so that those who live in the city below no longer have to look up and see themselves surrounded by blight? Or could you visually augment the favela in a way that positively impacts both the self-image of, and the quality of life for, the people living there while not erasing the presence of that ghetto from the visual awareness of the central city dwellers?”

Jane Jacobs (historic scholar of urban settings) is famous for coining the phrase “eyes on the street” – part of a larger realization that the presence of onlookers provides safety for residence, an understanding of which has since shaped mixed-use urban design.

One other question one might ask, then, would be in regards to whether these artistic “eyes” provide similar exposure (and thus safety) for residence (via visitors, viewers and appreciators from afar).