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Creating darkness

In theory it should be possible to cancel out light the same way we can do for example noise canceling. It's just a matter of canceling out the waveforms with exactly opposing phase waves.

Of course there is some differences in light and sound. First of all the light is not purely a wave. There is also the particle side of it so it's not exactly the same thing. But that's another thing which gets even more confusing when entering the quantum realm.

But yes, it's possible to cancel out light just like sound. The problem is the light is much more varied in different spectrum and most of the light we see is also coming scattered from many reflections so it's really hard to have such light source that could take into account all of that light.

In more controlled settings however the "active light canceling" is actually already used. In many laboratory experiments for example it's essential to be able to focus only on the light that is being studied and cancel out all other light from interfering the results.