Sitting on a bench at Penn Station this holiday season, you may notice that some of the passersby are a bit stranger than the usual array of grumpy commuters and harried holiday travelers. There’s a fish with human legs scampering between two of the station’s marble pillars, and the perfect steampunk—half dandy, half locomotive—chugging by. That’s not even mentioning the armadillo, or the pink-and-green women, or the legions of little white ghost-things.

Actually, all of those characters—and plenty more—are animated images moving across a still image of the station’s marble hall in a five-minute loop projected onto the window of an empty storefront inside the station. It’s hard to tell if it’s a reflection or a portal to a parallel dimension.

The doubling effect is mesmerizing—Sierra Jones, a former Baltimore School for the Arts student back from college for the school’s Alumni Night, sits there for at least half an hour watching it as her phone charges—but it is also a bit vertiginous, like travel itself.

Laurence Arcadias, Lynn Tomlinson, Rick Delaney, Steve Meneely, and their students in MICA’s animation department created the work as part of the Contemporary Museum and the Downtown Partnership’s collaborative exhibition Moving Right Along.

Sue Spaid, the Contemporary’s director, got the idea for a show about transit when the Contemporary found itself with no gallery, waiting to move into its new space on North Charles Street after vacating the Mutual Home Life building last fall.

The museum had already gotten an Operation Storefront grant from the Downtown Partnership, where Sarah Edelsburg was also looking for ways to reinvigorate public spaces that are hurried through and overlooked. (Disclosure: This writer read as part of the “Poets in Preston” series she organized this fall.) So the organizations teamed up and put out a call for artists, eventually determining that the Contemporary would organize the part of the exhibition at Penn Station, while the Downtown Partnership would organize a show of outdoor sculpture at Central Plaza in January.

“We don’t have the contacts with the art world,” Edelsburg says. “The Contemporary was able to help us reach out and find artists to work with.”

Spaid says that is exactly the kind of facilitation in which the Contemporary should be involved: “We’d like to be perceived as a mediator by other institutions in the community, to help set them up with artists.”

Together, the Contemporary, the Downtown Partnership, and Amtrak were looking for works that were playful and interactive and addressed the passage of time. Of the three works included in the show, MICA’s animations are the most immediately engaging.

> Email Baynard Woods