Turning the local landscape into an outdoor theater set, hundreds of volunteers in Germany’s Saale Valley staged a series of live performances for the viewing pleasure of train passengers zipping by.

Spanning nearly 20 miles, the Bewegtes Land (or “Moving Land”) project featured a series of fast-moving vignette pieces designed to entertain and amuse, featuring things like a surprise (fake) lake shark and scampering.

Organized by media artists and Bauhaus professors Jörn Hintzer and Jacob Hüfner, the idea was to grab attention for just a few moments at a time (much like we are used to in today’s digital world). The action goes fast indeed, often unfolding in seconds.

Just a shark ?? #lookout #bewegtesland #artproject #artseenfromthetrain #stagethelandscape #todayandtomorrow #NaumburgJena #bauhausuniversi… pic.twitter.com/WDVFXZ19ic

— Natalia Irina Roman (@StoriesOfBerlin) August 26, 2017

Across the rural area in which the performances played out, over 400 residents volunteered their time to take part, turning the enterprise into a community-building experience. It was also a nice way to put the place on the map.

#BestOf #BewegtesLand zwischen #Naumburg und #Jena. Dank an alle für die tolle Performance. @jenalichtstadt @DB_Bahn pic.twitter.com/nmVo3yRadB

— walsch (@mhenkenmeier) August 27, 2017

“For one thing, it’s a great weekend, but also people get to notice the beauty of the countryside,” a local mayor reported. “This is not a typical tourist area so maybe this will attract more people.”

A temporary metropolis for tens of thousands built annually in Nevada’s remote Black Rock Desert, the Burning Man festival is famous for its extreme architecture and creative art cars, the latter now including a transformed Boeing 747.

Fitting this year’s theme of Da Vinci’s Workshop (art and technological innovation), the huge gutted hull has been in the works for seven years thanks to Big Imagination Foundation and their supporters.

The carved-out jumbo jet invites people to hop on board for speakers, parties and other events. It is being towed around the dusty playa by a surprisingly small service vehicle, a bit like one might see on the tarmac at an airport.

A team of over 100 artists, engineers and other creatives helped strip and reconstruct the original plane, reinforcing its removed structure with custom interior supports and adding a series of staircases.

Anyone who has attended the festival will know that one of the most fascinating experiences is the serendipity of boarding a big art vehicle and seeing where it leads, either spatially or experientially (or both). This may be the best such adventure yet, featuring interactive art, music and other live performances and inspirational talks.

The world’s first live tattoo projection mapping event turned tattoos from static works into performance art, creating dazzling animations from inked body artworks.

Filmed in Lisbon by Oskar & Gaspar, the above video highlights the infinite possibilities of this approach, from filling in details and colors to completing partial tattoos or even animating them in living color.

Like the future tattoos from William Gibson’s book The Peripheral, the result can seem like organic behavior, with faces coming to life and snakes slithering across a body’s surface.

Remarkably, the entire film was made without any post-production – what you see as the viewer of the short film above is exactly what the audience saw on the day of the event. We still may be a ways away from embedded nanobot tattoos, but when we get there, this will be an excellent source of inspiration for the tattoo artists of the future.

Mons, Belgium might just be the most interesting and artistic-looking city on the entirety of Google Street View, full of seemingly spontaneous dramatic scenes like chaotic clouds of floating white feathers, painters turning sidewalk crossings neon pink, and basketballs falling out of trees like fruit. The theatrical performances are timed to coincide with the arrival of Google’s camera-equipped van when it comes along to map out the area.

Mons Street Review, spearheaded by artists Ludovic Nobileau and Antonia Taddei, is an initiative put on by the city as part of its agenda as a European culture capital. The scenes are curated by citizens, who transform the streets into urban theater sets and pose as the camera passes.

The artists encouraged people to come up with their own ideas, create their own roles and costumes, and arrange props however they like. About 900 people participated on 42 streets, essentially hijacking Google’s service to promote themselves and their city.

The aim is to present Mons the way the people see it, as a living place of culture and history rather than a series of static street view images. Says Nobileau, “It should be up to people, rather than Google, to represent cities.”

Combining choreographed movement and projected abstractions, these works of performed art are visually stunning, creating effects and illusions far beyond the sum of their parts.

From its creators, Pixel, shown above, “is a dance show for 11 dancers in a virtual and living visual environement. A work on illusion combining energy and poetry, fiction and technical achievement, hip hop and circus. A show at the crossroads of arts and at the crossroads of Adrien M / Claire B’s and Mourad Merzouki’s universes.”

The idea of projecting onto moving performers is, however, not new – indeed, Klaus Obermaier has been using low-tech projectors and equipment to create equally amazing work for decades. Indeed, while speaking at INST-INT recently in Minneapolis, he joked that he would carry on using his decade-old laptop until it broke down.

Indeed, the lower-tech approach he takes relies heavily on the ability of each dancer to have complete control of their own movements, making their skill a critical part of each and every exhausting performance.

Obermaier has also engaged in other forms of public interactive projection art over the years, taking his productions off the stage and allowing passers by to interact with his work.