Beams of light dance, jump, squiggle, scatter and interact with each other as if they’ve taken on a life of their own in a series of animated light art gifs by New York City-based photographer Lucea Spinelli. Abandoned school buses, public park benches, playgrounds, glass jars and human bodies become the settings for surreal, almost ghostly scenes calling to mind the common superstition of supernatural beings affecting electricity.

In fact, all that seems to be missing from some of these animations is a proton pack from Ghostbusters, as the clusters of light created by Spinelli take on the movements of autonomous beings. Spinelli takes still shots of moving light using long exposure methods and then strings them together to create these animated sequences.

“In her project phötosgraphé, Lucea Spinelli creates long exposure photographs that afford us a view into the unknown,” reads the statement on the artist’s website. “For the duration of the open shutter the lens becomes a canvas upon which Lucea paints with light. The illuminated forms she creates interact with spaces and objects in a wa that evoke the unseen – such as spirit, dreams and metaphor – within the everyday.”

“Often staying in the dark for long hours and relying on muscle memory alone, the process reflects ritual as a necessary part of interacting and evoking the unseen aspects of our reality. Thus by using a medium is commonly used to mimic reality, to suspend it, Lucea invites us to push beyond the bounds of visual perception to explore other ways of knowing. Finally, by stringing sequences of these long exposure photographs together into an animated gif, the light forms are literally brought to life as they dance across the forever looping frame.”

Churches are scrawled with ephemeral graffiti, public squares transmit profound messages and trees come to life with the moving heads of Cambodian deities when artists use digital projectors to transmit imagery onto urban surfaces. These 10 artists project words, classical art, geometric shapes, mirage-like fields of color or their own photography onto everything from Capitol buildings to screens made of water.

Jenny Holzer

American artist Jenny Holzer uses words on an unprecedented scale, especially with her outdoor light projections, introducing commentary to public spaces. While the words were her own from the time she started in 1977 until roughly 2001, she has begun working with texts written by others, including the works of great literary figures and sources like declassified US Army documents from the war in Iraq.

Clement Briend

Trees come to life in the sculptural images of deities and spirits from Cambodian culture in the series Cambodian Trees by French artist Clement Briend. Highlighting the nature that can be found within urban contexts, the series transformed the streets of Paris. Says brined, “Such nocturnal visions allow us to grasp the way magic profoundly influences how Cambodian people perceive the world.”

Luftwerk

Artist duo Luftwerk, made up of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, integrated Chicago’s iconic Cloud Gate into a light art installation called Luminous Field. The work used the reflective qualities of the sculpture to enhance and magnify imagery that was projected onto the ground around it.

Usman Haque

Commissioned by the City of Santa Monica for Glow 08, ‘Primal Source’ by Usman Haque was projected onto a large-scale waterscreen/mist projection system at a beach location near the city’s pier to create a mirage-like effect. The light changes in response to the sounds emanating from the crowd. “Some modes created ‘captures’ whose colour, shape and movement followed the frequency and amplitude dynamics of individual syllables and sentences picked up; other modes responded to wider collective phenomena, e.g. distorting a grid in response to the crowd volume, or creating a rush of wind through a wheat-field landscape.”

Paolo Buroni

Classic art comes to the streets for all to see when Italian multimedia artist Paolo Buroni projects images onto architecture in public squares. “I like to create change – to change reality with imagination,” says the artist. His works have been commissioned for events like the Venice Biennale and has appeared in Nuremburg,, Budapest, Istanbul, Paris and Seoul.

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Light Art Looms Large 10 Artists Project Illuminated Images

Swirls and pillars of light hover in fields or against dark urban backdrops like phantom monuments, captured on camera in a way that just can’t be perceived by the human eye. UK-based artist Sola literally paints with light, his amorphous creations seeming to take on three dimensions for just a split second as if the light itself has gathered up a mass of its own.

Looking for an outlet for personal expression led Sola to professional photography, documenting the sports, bands and lifestyles that he was into. Eventually, though, he wanted something that would give him more control over the creative process.

“Then I found light painting. Quite by accident one night while shooting landscapes of the urban environment and instantly I knew it was what I’d been looking for. I like to keep things real. I shoot with digital cameras, yes, but I employ principles of analogue film technology – in that once I’ve made an image I don’t change it any more than I could in a darkroom and therefore what you see, is what I shoot.”

“I believe there’s a real magic to creating something wondrous that’s ‘real.’ Sure, there’s a place for post production in this world but on the whole, you won’t find any here. To the point that even if I am caught in the scene the image is thrown away. I aim to create images that allow the viewer to suspend their reality and simply enjoy the energy and mystery of the image.”

See lots of more Sola’s work, including collaborations with NIKE and other brands, at LightBombing.com.

An iPad, a projector and an app called Tagtool are all you need to turn your city into a virtual canvas for your own custom light art and animations. Created by Vienna-based OMAi, Tagtool enables you to create art with your fingers on an iPad and project it large-scale onto the sides of buildings. You can flip the interface if you’re left-handed.

Two or more collaborators can team up using wifi, inventing characters and animated stories or creating interactive light art shows for a crowd. In fact, any flat surface is turned into a performance art venue. Want to just play around at home? Use an AV adapter to display it on a TV, or just use an Apple TV for Airplay streaming.

Check out this video to see the app in ‘multiplayer’ action.

Tagtool was inspired by a DIY creation that works like a musical instrument, plugging into a projector. You can build your own version of the original Tagtool, but the app makes the whole process a lot easier and more intuitive. It’s available in the iTunes App Store. (via Pop Up City)

City dwellers are bombarded each day with the demands of advertisers, government, media and other groups that dominate communication, and their own voices can be lost in the din. Signs, images and symbols confront us on every possible surface with messages that tell us what to do and how to think. YOUR TEXT HERE, an installation by artist Marcos Zotes, flips that dynamic, displaying the words of citizens in bold type on the sides of buildings.

YOUR TEXT HERE is an urban light art installation that projects short messages from participants onto buildings, allowing them to broadcast their thoughts and feelings back to the city. Users enter their messages through a website on their mobile phones, enabling their voices to be heard while remaining anonymous.

More than 1,000 anonymous messages were projected for 10 to 20 seconds each during DLECTRICITY, an outdoors light art festival that took place in midtown Detroit in October 2012.

While this particular project was approved by local officials, ‘projection bombing‘ is often done guerrilla-style. Because it’s temporary and the source of the light can be hard to pinpoint, it offers a relatively easy way to get messages across to a large number of people without fear of getting in trouble with the authorities. This technique was used by activist Mike Read during the peak of Occupy Wall Street to display messages like “Look around, you are a part of a global uprising.”