Step into one of Darel Carey’s art installations and you’ll quickly lose your sense of the room’s actual dimensions, your confused eyes tripping over illusions of ridges and voids that aren’t really there. Using nothing but roll after roll of black electrical tape, Carey transforms ordinary spaces into disorienting, graphic landscapes that seem to shift as you look at them.

Sure, there are easier ways to achieve similar effects – plastering the walls with printed wallpaper, for example, or projecting the images. But Carey prefers the meditative process of hand-taping his designs, and he says the spaces often take shape of their own accord.

Carey calls his method ‘dimensionalizing,’ and notes that it was originally meant to be highly temporary. He’d step in, work intuitively within the space and record himself creating the installation. The resulting images and time-lapse videos were sometimes the only evidence these alternate reality rooms ever existed, since they’d sometimes be taken down within mere hours. Now, he’s working toward installations that last a little longer, like his room at the Museum of Selfies in Los Angeles.

The time lapse videos are fascinating in their own right as Carey “bends space” simply by changing the direction of the tape as well as altering its width to produce the illusion of topography on smooth, flat surfaces.

The work may look mathematical in nature, but Carey tells New Element Art that his work is “mostly organic and freestyle. And the only mathematics involved is naturally applied.”

“I like it when people say they lose their orientation in the space. Because it lets me know that my dimensional lines are doing their job and giving the mind and eye something to ponder.

Do you see beauty in a cinder block wall, a street crossing or a stop sign? Chances are, you don’t even notice them – but Aakash Nihalani would like to help you out with that. The Brooklyn-based street artist calls attention to the mundane using bright rolls of tape, bringing out extra dimensions that incite passersby to take a second look at their surroundings.

Currently finishing up an interactive design festival in France, the Les Grandes Traversees, Nihalani has gained wide renown for his 3D urban art. The artist freehands his typically geometric tape designs, sometimes directly on a surface (as quickly as possible) and sometimes on a cardboard backing to produce a rigid cutout that can stand alone.

Asked whether he ever tussles with authorities over removing his work, Nihalani said, “I’ve asked cops and maintenance staff to wait for me to take a quick photo before they start taking it down, and most have let me.”

“There’s also been plenty of instances of workers walking past me and not saying anything even though they see me taping. And on very rare occasions a person in uniform will stop just to share some positive feedback, human to human.”

It’s a spider web so large, a human family could set up furniture and make a home inside of it. But this stunningly sticky creation is no work of nightmarish monster spiders – it’s an art installation made of packing tape by design collective For Use/Numen.

With its long, hollow tubes suspended five feet in the air from surrounding walls and pillars, the packing tape cocoon is like a giant artistic bounce house/jungle gym for adults, who can crawl inside and lounge around, comfortably supported by 117,000 feet and 100 pounds of tape.

“The installation is based on an idea for a dance performance in which the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between the pillars,” For Use’s Christoph Katzler told Fast Company, who produced this video. “The dancers are stretching the tape while they move, so the resulting shape is a recording of the choreography.”

The project – which has grown progressively larger, starting in a small Croatian gallery and then inside an abandoned attic before moving on to the former Viennese stock exchange building pictured – will get a bigger stage than ever in September when it travels to a public space in the center of Frankfurt, Germany.