PROVIDENCE -- Terrorists turned planes into missiles and leveled the World Trade Center in 2001. Paul Myoda, a RISD graduate and now a Brown University faculty member, saw the surreal aftermath that night from Brooklyn.

The Twin Towers were gone; so were 3,000 people. Myoda, an artist, once worked in a studio near the top of the north tower. All he could see were huge plumes of dust and smoke, eerily illuminated by floodlights.

"It was an incredibly bright cloud, like an unimaginable hallucination," Myoda recalls. "You could almost see the towers. That's where the idea of Phantom Towers came, like phantom limbs. The idea was to restructure that cloud into the shape of the towers."

The public art display that Myoda created with Julian LaVerdiere was initially called Phantom Towers -- two soaring columns of blue light connecting the earth to the sky.

"We had many meetings with state and federal officials and victims' family members," Myoda says. "They suggested, rather than emphasize the towers, we should rather emphasize the people, the victims. We then renamed it Tribute in Light."

The first presentation of Tribute in Light took place in lower Manhattan at 9/11's six-month anniversary, after a test run in Nevada.

Today, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the installation art will be exhibited again in the city's financial district, for the sixth time.

Eighty-eight 7,000-watt spotlights will be turned on and will stay on through dawn tomorrow. The all-night lighting schedule is for psychological reasons.

"People were predicting emotional trauma of having the lights turned off abruptly," Myoda says. "It would be reminding them of what happened to the buildings."

Myoda is 1989 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied photography and sculpture. Until one month before the terrorist attack, he worked with LaVerdiere in a studio on the north tower's 91st floor, one floor below where American Airlines Flight 11 bore into the building.

Myoda, now a first-year assistant professor of visual art at Brown, was working in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World View Studio Program. When he first visited the studio, in early 2001, he looked out the windows and immediately thought of the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center.

"There is an incredible vertigo that happens," Myoda says. "When there's a lot of wind, the buildings are designed to sway up to eight feet. You can feel that, and hear the walls creaking."

Through Creative Time, a nonprofit arts organization, Myoda and LaVerdiere were creating an artistic light beacon for the rooftop of the north tower. It would, Myoda says, represent bioluminiscent plankton. They conducted a news preview of their work. Editors of The New York Times Magazine attended.

A month later came 9/11.

Could the artists, the editors asked, come up with a way to respond to the catastrophe? Myoda and LaVerdiere responded with a rendering of their idea that appeared on the cover of the Sunday magazine two weeks later.

The public response was strong and immediate.

"We were all kind of surprised by the power of the image," Myoda says.

It turns out three architects had also come up with a similar commemorative response. But instead of a competition, there was a collaboration.

"It was in the spirit of the rescue and recovery effort," Myoda says. "People set aside their egos."

Companies contributed money, equipment and electricity to the $500,000 project, which has been reintroduced at each anniversary. The site, however, is not at the former World Trade Center, which is now a construction site. Tribute of Light takes place at a nearby open lot.

"We wanted white light," Myoda says. "But because of atmospheric conditions, it always appears blue."

That's fine, according to Myoda. The buildings were a light blue-grey.

Before its demise, Myoda described the World Trade Center as "a very dehumanizing place," with "an aesthetic akin to computer punch cards."

Now, Myoda doesn't think of the buildings as being so bad.

"That's the irony a lot of people experienced after 9/11," he says. "Before, they thought the buildings were an abomination."

A landmark was lost, Myoda says, but, more important, so were thousands of lives.

"The feelings for the people who were there eclipse anything," Myoda says.

Tribute in Light can be seen for many miles. And what people see, or feel, Myoda says, depends on their disposition. Some may see a haunting specter of the past; others a vision of the future.

"It points in two directions, both literally and metaphorically," he says. "It points to the ground. Many people think that ground is sacrosanct, a graveyard. It also points up, out and beyond."

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