New York City never sleeps, they say, and this animation shows just how active the city is by day and at night, combining elements of both in one film that represents “22 Trips to New York, 352 Hours of filming, $1,430 paid in Parking Fees, 9988 Miles Driven, and 232,000 Pictures Taken.” The result is a breathtaking architectural animation that becomes increasingly surreal as you watch.

“Traditional time-lapses are constrained by the idea that there is a single universal clock,” explains creator Julian Tryba. “In the spirit of Einstein’s relativity theory, layer-lapses assign distinct clocks to any number of objects or regions in a scene. Each of these clocks may start at any point in time, and tick at any rate. The result is a visual time dilation effect known as layer-lapse.”

The filmmaker quit his job a few years ago after the success of his Boston Layer-Lapse film and began focusing his next project on the Big Apple. To level things up, he began writing code to deal with the myriad more images this new piece would involve. “To create a layer-lapse effect, I am assigning a unique equation to hundreds of buildings simultaneously. For each frame, every building is calculating and deciding which time of day to reveal. One example of a script that yields a ‘look’ are the waves of day or night that move through some of the shots in this film.”

“To achieve the ‘look’ I can set parameters like the speed at which the wave moves across the screen, how rapidly each layer will switch from day to night or vice versa, and I’ll often use a random sinusoidal function to create a subtle oscillation inside the wave itself. Now I’ve probably lost half my audience but for those of you still reading, the final step is linking an action or a script to a piece of the music.” In the end, the work is a combination of mathematical and manual animation.

Motion pictures aside, the nature of photographic representation implies freezing space in time – a moment captured and preserved, independent of what comes before or after.

Yet, as photographer Fong Qi Wei points out, “we do know that time is also a dimension, like length, breadth and width. In fact, physicists have a model called space-time: suggesting that time is part of a continuum with the 3 dimensions that we are familiar with. But the print is still an instance. Most paintings and photographs are an instance of time. That’s not the way the world works. We experience a sequence of time.”

His solution is this photo series, Time is a Dimension, in composed mostly of “landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes,” which “are a single composite made from sequences that span 2-4 hours, mostly of sunrises and sunsets. The basic structure of a landscape is present in every piece[, but] each panel or concentric layer shows a different slice of time, which is related to the adjacent panel/layer. The transition from daytime to night is gradual and noticeable in every piece, but would not be something you expect to see in a still image.”

There is a playful and experimental quality to the variety of approaches found within this set of images. Sometimes a series of casually-drawn circles spread out from a focal point. In other cases, rays like a child’s drawing of sunshine span from some implied but out-of-frame source. Each has at least one surprise upon inspection, like the changing reflections in glass over the course of a day, or the differences in artificial illumination going into the night. Overall, the results are rich in colors and shades but also do tell a story of time elapsing, quite by design.

You see the finished pieces all over – ornate, curved and layered – but rarely get such a vivid and complete all-angle, real-time view of how their tags come together. If you are even remotely interested in graffiti, this behind-the-scenes video with its shifting point of view is well worth a few minutes of your time.

Featuring Melbourne street artist Sofles and directed, filmed and edited by Celina Mills of Unity Sound & Visual, this video provides a whirlwind four-minute window into the creative process behind tagging. Instead of a static shot of a single tag, though, the camera follows the artist from wall to wall, into an abandoned building and more.

What makes it really remarkable, though, is that it gives you a tour of different scenarios and contexts for various styles and types of graffiti creation. It features interior and exterior settings as well as canvasses ranging from blank to brick to already-painted – so you can see what happens from start to finish in all kinds of urban situations.

With the rise of digital technologies, photographers are finding increasingly fascinating ways to capture minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and even entire years. Here are just three extraordinary time-lapse photography examples spanning from seconds to minutes through a 24-hour day and culminating in a full 365-day year.

Sean Lenz & Kristoffer Abildgaard are on the shorter end of the spectrum, but their colorful collaborations are nonetheless spectacular. Their shots range from a few seconds up to several minutes, and capture luminescent paint sticks placed in above waterfalls – the path of the material traces the movement of the water. “To accomplish some of the more complicated shots they strung several sticks together at once to create different patterns of illumination. For those of you concerned about pollution, the sticks (which are buoyant) were never opened and were collected at the end of each exposure, thus no toxic goo was mixed into the water.”

Eirik Solheim started shooting pictures out of his window daily, then realize that with coding help from colleagues and readers, he could compile a time-lapse collage of an entire year. “The resolution of the 16 000 images I now have from 2010 are 3888×2592 pixels. So I selected 3888 images snapped during the day.” From there, he created a series of videos as well as the finalized composite still image above.

Japanese culture is commonly thought of as being centered around quiet politeness and public respect. If so, this may be a physical representation of that interpretation – a remarkably subtle and deferential structure-destroying process with many levels of conscientious thought behind it (not to mention a brilliant visual effect, per the video below).

This elegant form of razing is “reverse engineering” in a much more literal sense – taking apart what has been put together with equal care. The strange structure that seems to move down the building does just that: at each stage, it is held up, then strategically lowered as the process unfolds, making it appear as if the building is shrinking (perhaps imperceptibly to pedestrians, but noticeable as time lapses).

Demolition might be too strong a word: Taisei’s Ecological Reproduction System (aka Tecorep) caps buildings and proceeds to disassemble them piece by piece and level by level in order to reuse intact components and materials. While the approach is not entirely unique to Japan, the lengths gone to in these cases to dampen sound and reduce construction clutter are particularly pronounced.

The process does more than just aid in reuse – it lower environmental impact, from dust and debris to sound, all of which are buffered. And as elements are dropped down by crane, the power generated by that release of potential energy serves to generate electricity for the deconstruction efforts. The entire system is, in short, incredibly considerate and extremely well thought-out.