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Light -- is it wave or particles, or something else altogether? It bends and refracts like a wave but also behaves like individual particles, or photons, in other situations.

After centuries of debate, scientists have sort of settled on a wave-particle duality theory that recognizes light as having properties of both.

Understanding light is not necessary to appreciate it. But for artists, an understanding of light's physical properties can lead to works like those that will be on exhibit tomorrow when InLight Richmond: Art, Turned On is presented as part of the First Fridays Artwalk series.

More than 40 artists took on the challenge to create light-inspired art and the results will light up several blocks of Broad Street for a dusk to midnight street festival and gallery party.

"I think we aim to understand how [light] will perform under all sorts of conditions," said architect Peter Culley, who is leading a team chosen to do an exhibit. "Certainly the ability to distort, focus and grab light is central to the use of artificial and natural light for many artists and designers."

InLight Richmond is modeled after Nuit Blanche, an all-night lightfestival in Paris, said Maureen Neal. She's co-chair of InLight Richmond and a board member of 1708 Gallery, lead organizer for the event. Richmond is one of several U.S. cities to embrace the idea and put on its own light night art events.

"One of our board members had been to Nuit Blanche in Paris, and started talking about the festival of lights they had," said Neal.

Expect for art to be coming out of the sidewalks, literally, and just about everywhere else tomorrow. When the call went out in January for artists to submit proposals for the event, the list of places where works could be installed included sidewalks, rooftops, doorways, parking lots and street medians, along with the more traditional gallery windows.

In all, there will be about 45 installations, including visual and performance art, said Neal. There will also be Wearable InLight, an illuminated fashion show, and people are invited to show up wearing light-inspired fashions and adornments and become part of a light procession.

"Culley's team, which includes Adam Frantzis, Eleni Savvidou and Andrew Montgomery, is creating a house of light in a parking lot between two buildings. The team took as a model a Jackson Ward row house, distinctive in how deep they are, sometimes extending back 90 feet from the street, said Culley.

"We designed a version of that that would fit the site," said Culley, a London-based architect who is in Richmond serving as project director for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts master plan and expansion. "Then we modeled it on the computer. We removed all the walls and roof and were just left with all the doors and window."

Metal frames will be painted with ultra-violet paint and suspended from scaffolding where the doors and windows would be. Black floodlight will be projected onto the frames, creating the sense of floating doors and windows of a house.

Artist David Grainger, a Virginia Commonwealth University graduate who is teaching there this fall, will exhibit three short videos that will be shown on a monitor set up in a door front. One of the videos, titled "Dervish," was filmed in Puerto Rico earlier this year.

"It's like a little rain forest outside of the capitol of San Juan. it was really beautiful there," said Grainger. "There was a street, kind of abandoned. Nature was coming back and overtaking it. The light there was bright, fantastic. I had the camera and tripod and set it up."

Tatiana Ginsberg's work "Glimmer" will be displayed in a window. It is made of handmade paper and vinyl, with light strategically projected from the rear.

"For me, light is always the unwritten medium in your piece," said Ginsberg, a New Yorker now living in California. "You never list it when you list materials, but it is one of them.

The Science Museum of Virginia will set up its Star Lab at the downtown main library as part of InLight Richmond children's activities.

It's worth noting, said David Hagan, a staff scientist at the Science Museum, that there have been great artists who were also great scientists. Italian Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci was among them. Among the many interests of Da Vinci, who painted "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa," was optics.

"The way that light makes colors and mixes colors gives both paintings and three dimensional objects the huge array of possibilities for visual presentation," said Hagan.