Create a visible ripple effect as you move within this dazzling interactive infinity room by Japanese collective teamLab, producing your own unique wave patterns influenced by your gestures, movements and speed. For their new installation at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, entitled ‘Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement,’ teamLab took inspiration from the ocean and all of the ways in which the currents and flows of water are altered by objects and environmental conditions.

This video shows off the stunning effects as a lone visitor makes her way through the room. You can see as each of her steps results in a flurry of tiny light particles that transform into lines and then form patterns, ultimately joining together into the vortices referenced by the name. The faster she moves, the stronger her ‘force’ is exerted upon the waves.

“If a person is not moving or there are no more people, no flow will occur and nothing will be present in the space,” says teamLab. “Works are born and continue to transform under the influence of people’s movement.”

“In the ocean, complicated terrain such as an island produces flow velocity difference and a vortex is generated. Vortices swirl up the carcasses of organisms sunk to the bottom of the ocean, producing nutritious seawater. This becomes a source of nutrition for plankton to grow and nourishes the sea life. Vortices therefore contribute to enriching the ocean.”

Anyone who visits ‘Music Festival, TeamLab Jungle’ this summer will get to immerse themselves in a space made of light, interacting with moving beams to help produce collaborative crowd-sourced music. ‘Light Chords’ is one of three ‘4D’ light-based installations the Japanese interdisciplinary group has planned for the event, all of which represent a unique intersection of art, design, technology and nature.

‘Light Chords’ aims to create the sensation of being inside a massive musical instrument, touching the ‘strings’ to produce a sound and hearing it reverberate all around you. The beams of light rise into the sky when touched and then settle back down to be activated again.

The second 4D space, Light Vortex, places visitors at the center of a surreal light show that bends and stretches around the space, while ‘Light Cave’ builds complex light-based architecture over attendees’ heads.

Known for their use of illumination as an artistic medium and for a focus on interactivity, TeamLab brings their ‘Music Festival’ to various cities and spaces each year, with different experiences to be had by day and by night. Before dark, TeamLab Jungle is designed as a music festival for families, while after dark it becomes more like a dance party with BACARDÍ-sponsored bars.

Take a seat inside this human-sized zoetrope, pull the bar back and forth and watch as fairytale imagery come to life around you. ‘Loop’ is the main installation at this year’s Luminothérapie, an interactive public art installation competition that takes place in Quebec each year. Developed by artists Olivier Girouard and Jonathan Villenueve in collaboration with Ottoblix, ‘Loop’ tells 13 different stories in each of the oversized illuminated circles placed along a street in Montreal.

The zoetrope, in case you’re not familiar, is a pre-film animation device that displays a sequence of images within a cylinder to produce an illusion of motion; users look through slits in the cylinder to watch it. ‘Loop’ takes this traditional object and updates it with interactivity and light, asking users to power the spinning cylinder themselves. A flickering strobe light illuminates the monochrome images lining the inside.

‘Loop’ took three months of design work and 800 hours of assembly to complete. One of the designers makes a living building Lego sets, while the other has been designing since he was just a child. Explaining how they came up with the concept, Olivier Girouard says Villanueve took inspiration from mechanical interventions at Berlin’s Technology Museum.

“Thinking of hamster wheels, we decided to build a vertical zoetrope. So we combined three mechanical elements: the railway push-car (like the ones made famous by Bugs Bunny cartoons), the music box and the zoetrope. We came up with the idea and sketched out the project just one week before the deadline for submitting proposals!”

“Our invention reminds me of the Chimera, the mythological three-headed beast born of the intersection of different universes,” says Villanueve. “I like this more or less unclassifiable hybrid machine. Is it a toy? A projection device? A kind of lighting? Looking at previous Luminothérapie pieces, we noticed that installations that were not only participatory but also collaborative, where participants had to act together to produce a result were – in our opinion – the more successful projects and the most appreciated by the public.”

Loop will light up the Place des Festivals in Montreal until January 29th, when it will take off on a tour of Quebec cities. Check out last year’s installation – a series of illuminated see-saws.

Red neon lights arranged in geometric shapes or casting eerie illumination onto darkened trees almost seem like a natural phenomenon in the vein of the aurora borealis, captured by photographers who manage to be in the right place at the right time. A glow coming from a slit in a snowy landscape or just under the surface of the sea hints at the presence of life forms just out of sight.

‘La Linea Roja’ by photographer Nicolas RIVALS carries on a longstanding tradition of introducing artificial lights to natural spaces for high-impact temporary art installations, but adds a little something extra in the form of a strikingly limited color palette, moody skies, black lines of tree silhouettes and surprisingly natural-looking compositions.

The Paris-based photographer installed the lights in various landscapes while on a trip through Spain, capturing the effect using long-exposure photographs.

Here’s what RIVALS has to say about the series:

“A red line woven over a journey through Spain, to connect Man with nature. A red line to fix a moment of poetry. Unreal scenes which existed for a night to disappear in the morning. An installation left as a proposition to the natural world. A luminous harmony between will and chance. Between tribute and sacrilege. Between the beautiful and the range. An aesthetic research on shapes engaging in dialogue with an asymmetrical nature.”

The ceilings of Paris’ Saint Eustache Church are once again alive and flickering with a surreal display of abstract imagery as artist Miguel Chevalier projects ‘Voûtes Célestes’ onto its vaults, nave and transepts. Installed for the annual Nuit Blanche (All-Nighter) event, the live light show flashes, ripples and glows along to musical improvisations by the church’s organist, envisioning imaginary sky charts created by Chevalier in real time.

Blankets of stars and other celestial bodies glimmer in the dark, transected by neon lines in green, red and yellow that crackle light lightning and ripple as if being blown by wind. The lights interact with the architecture of the church, blurring its actual form and creating trompe l’oeil effects. At times, the entire ceiling seems to disappear, putting on display an imaginary sky full of colorful lights.

“These suspended universes accentuate one’s impression of the monument’s loftiness and lightness,” says Chevalier. “Visitors are invited to stroll around, to sit in the pews, and to lift up their eyes toward the heavens. These digital constellation of pixels immerse visitors in an atmosphere bathed in light while opening unto infinity.”

“The installation releases radiant energy into this space of plentitude. Amplified by Saint Eustache’s organ music, the installation induces a spiritual and contemplative feeling of elevation. Light, color and movement create a poetics of matter and elaborate a new aesthetics of virtuality.”