At MIT, artist Vik Muniz has pursued his interests in image production and visual literacy, working with researchers in biology, optics and engineering.


In collaboration with Marcelo Coelho, a PhD candidate in the Fluid Interfaces Group, and Rehmi Post, a Visiting Scientist at the Center for Bits and Atoms, Muniz developed a process to machine microscopic images onto millimeter-wide grains of sand. The images were later transformed into large, high-resolution prints.


With Tal Danino, a Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research, Muniz used bacteria, cancer and liver cells as the medium for a series of patterns and portraits. They used the bacteria as “paint” in much the same way that stencils or silk-screens are made. Muniz and Danino hope these images will increase awareness of the importance of microscopic organisms, which are vital to life and also can be designed to diagnose and treat disease.


Presented by MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and the MIT Media Lab.


To learn more about Vik’s residency at MIT, click here.

Vik Muniz repurposes everyday materials, such as chocolate, ash, dirt, peanut butter, and jelly, to create intricate and heavily layered trompe l’oeil renderings, often of iconic artworks. Muniz’s highly-constructed works are not only “legible” on various levels but also call attention to their own legibility, conveying an image without concealing the language — or rather, the linguistics — of the image conveyed. In 2008, he undertook a large-scale project in Brazil, photographing trash-pickers as figures from emblematic paintings, such as Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassical Death of Marat, and then recreating the photographs in large-scale arrangements of trash. The project was documented in the 2010 film Waste Land in an attempt to raise awareness for urban poverty.
Muniz’s distinctive practice explores and revels in the instability that exists between craft and mechanical reproduction, between high art and popular culture, between the ephemeral and the perdurable, the coded and the recognizable. Muniz has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at museums including Art Museum of Banco de la República (Bogotá), Beyeler Foundation, MoMA P.S. 1 (NYC), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo), MACRO (Rome), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and the Menil Collection (Houston), and his work is included in major private and public collections around the world.
With support from the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and Institute for the Humanities

When the industrial productive capacity ultrapassed society’s consume capacity the product became less important than its image. We live today in a world of images which we do not only consume but also we have started to communicate through the mechanisms that fabricate them. Any intention of subverting such situation can be perceived as a challenge though the ever shrinking space for creative thought is located precisely where we not only transgress but also dissect and expose some of the these mechanisms.

There is a great cheese shop down on First Avenue, where I go quite often, often enough to notice that the person behind the counter never displays a cheese without first cutting off one eighth of it. When I asked why he did that, he blantly answered, “It’s obvious….otherwise it won’t look like cheese.” To analyze the tensions between the objects and their images one must negotiate the position of the object in the historical time with the object itself, and the history of its own making.

It is 3:30 A.M. and the plane crosses the Atlantic on the route Rio-Madrid. At this altitude the outside world seems to be of little or no importance. Inside, on the contrary everything has a specific value which has been dictated by its utility Everything inside the plane seems to be essential and in the present tense. Useful goods are designed not to have a memory (hints about their construction) or a future (technological overlaying advances). Taken by this form of useful and civilized schizophrenia I start to search my bag for personal photos or a stupid or meaningless ornament (now I understand why Sartre wanted a grotesque meaningless ornament over the mantelpiece in the set of Huis Clos). I search for Proust’s Madeleine, a divining rod. Freakish, stupid, something that would not compete or criticize the system which now my life depends on. Instead something that would show me other ways to deal with such a system (In Sartre’s play every object in the set is used: the second empire chairs, the knife, the door, except the ornament. Garcin never suspected the only exit to the hellish fate of the “ living” eternally in the present tense resided precisely in the contemplation of that object, the merciful gift of the author to his characters). Out of the window the earth is a massive object, dumb and unique. But from down near its elements interact not so different from the elements in this airplane’s interior.

The broken, the dwarfed, amputated, retarded, the residual. One can make of failure a working strategy (in fact one can be quite successful in failing). Like the bad magician transcends illusion, failure in the only device one can use to understand reality. The object or the picture has to fail (in a sort of Christian fashion) for you to meditate upon it (remember 3 miles inland?) But since failure is also a mans invention (who else would invent a plane crash or a flat tire) the failing object , before it fails, has to conquer a certain complicity with the viewer (Clown seduction?!?)

Galatea and Pinocchio failed as objects to become human. But its good to remember that they were “more human” as objects than after their change. Pinocchio and Galatea are exceptions, mistakes that may change the way and order in which we perceive all the other wooden puppets or Greek statues. Like a vaccine they were processed and given back to the world of object (although they became humans they area always referred to as puppet and statue).

The Golden , the frigid Tin Man of Oz and Disney’s singing and dancing household appliances are for the storyless industrialized goods what the movie stars and circus freaks are for factory or office workers: the ultimate customized reflection, a vehicle for transcendence. Handmade or handbroke, used, overgrown, dwarfed or simply pathetic, the art object should always behave like a freak, a continuous changing twisted mirror, challenging, cheating, destroying and outlining the meaning and importance of all the things around us.

The photographer Vik Muniz operates with impunity in the Bermuda Triangle bordered by commercial, popular and fine art, which can drive the art world a bit nuts. (He resembles David Hockney in this regard.) But he almost always puts on a good show in terms of sheer showmanship, and his current one is even better than usual. It reminds us that part of the razzledazzle of his art stems from physical texture, which almost no photographer has exploited with such optical richness.

Mr. Muniz’s particular fusion of the two main strands of postmodern photography — appropriation and setup — is aggressively material based and consequently uncannily tactile, if also sometimes rather hokey. Over the years he has remade, and then photographed, Corot landscapes from thread, Marilyn Monroe from diamonds, various Process Art pieces from dust and, perhaps most famously, sugar cane child laborers from sugar. Other works have employed luncheon meat,chocolate, coins, wire, spices, junk, tiny toys, dominoes and dry pigment.

Mr. Muniz’s latest efforts continue his long-term obsession with remaking famous paintings, this time using scraps torn from glossy magazines. A Degas bather, a Courbet nude, Caspar David Friedrich’s jaunty “Wanderer Above the Sea” and Gustave Caillebotte’s floor scrapers are among the canvases that he has carefully reproduced in collage, then photographed and enlarged to as much as 10 feet high. The effect is startling. All because of the vagaries of enlargement, it seems, the images almost appear to be pieced together from tiny pieces of fluttery, slightly fuzzy frayed cloth, like some kind of rag picker’s folk art.

There is of course a wild assortment of details to be gleaned from the elaborate foliage of the images, including small faces, figures, bits of words and text, and more art. The white ground surrounding Thomas Eakins’s 1880 “Crucifixion” is dotted with fragments of weeping Madonnas from various Northern Renaissance paintings, while an onlooker from George de La Tour’s “Fortune-Teller” directs her sidelong gaze at Jesus’ pelvis. But it is the larger impression — of quavering, fluttering surfaces, of the surfeit of detail, of painting actively overtaken by collage — that holds the eye. This crazed fusion of matter, hand and lens is always at play in Mr. Muniz’s photographs, but until now it has never been achieved in quite such adamant terms.

In my mind, the visual history of Latin America starts with a photo of a shirt. A strange advertisement; the soiled, blood splattered, garment worn by the emperor Maximilian at the moment of his execution, eternalized by the camera of his court photographer, Francois Aubert, in June 19th, 1867. Although taken by a European artist, this stunning image has epitomized the iconographic spirit of a vast cultural territory even to our days. The image is an essential Latin American photograph, an imperfect and ruptured membrane; a flag, a pamphlet, a cry striving to emblemize the cultural and economic divides of its fallaciously changing political context.

From Mexicali to Terra del Fuego history has never flown; it has always erupted intermittently forging a society that although extremely adaptive, has become chronically dependent on novel images to define its identity. Latin American images are not designed to document the passing of time; they seem to be made to keep it from happening. This frail sense of continuity has shaped an exceedingly history-conscious iconography; images that while overtly aware of their power and function always seem to be searching for an innocence they never had. The Latin American image is often a hot weapon seeking for redemption.

In times of peace, images serve the economy. They penetrate the innermost desires of the individual with the promise of personalized satisfaction, of distinction and exclusivity. In turbulent political circumstances, the cone seems to invert. Revolution does to information, what war does to science; it intensely promotes its development in a single direction. The past and the present become irrelevant; life becomes a balancing act over a bottomless reality through a dogmatic, but flimsy version of the future accompanied by a prevailing sentiment that the truth is never “out there”.

For most of my lifetime, the history of my continent was got to me in two conflicting versions, one sensed in the often incomprehensible clamor of society and the other clearly disseminated through the state controlled media. My formative years were spent dwelling in the vertigo of this chasm separating my reality, an ambiguous amalgam of reflective sensations of past and present from the opaque and synthetic adaptation presented by the “authorities”. A sensation that became more pronounced every time I became aware that no matter how thunderous the chaotic racket of popular culture announces its weight and substance, it is always taken as a triviality in face of the imminent requirement of an “official” story. I grew up immersed in this laborious semiotic black market, where information could be neither readily consumed nor easily dispersed. I think that the main reason why I decided to become an artist was to come up with a “grammar” that would explain and fill this divide.

The essence of our iconography always seems to emerge from this rift. It is precisely in the chards, the debris, the shrapnel left over in the concocting of these chiseled, monolithic information structures that true artists search for what is still preciously human. I see the true face of my continent reflected in the uncomfortable gaze of Martin Chambi’s studio subjects, In José Medeiros trendsetting beach scenes, I see it in the awkward posture of Alvarez Bravo’s longing adolescent girl leaning over a rail; a self, trapped in a body that doesn’t seem to be her own. I see the eternal plight of the individual trying to conform to something beyond its nature, a strange and continuous becoming. I see my continent in this search for the accidental, this illusion of innocence, and in this identity discrepancy.

Over the last two decades, globalist economic and cultural trends along with the advent of the Internet helped improve considerably the understanding of photography in isolated contexts such as Latin America, Africa and Asia. These movements have also enabled the local artist to speak to a much wider audience. This new exposure has deeply affected their production pushing it beyond local contexts and stimulating the creation of cultural artifacts with broader international ambitions. Contemporary visual production in Latin America has transcended its traditional vocabulary of tangible and objective themes but has not done away with its shrewdness, attentiveness and grit. Yet, the international market has still been reluctant in absorbing these artists into its high echelons.

American and European images have greatly helped to forge the cultural identity of the Latin America we know today. As our continent gradually ceases to be simply perceived as a subject, It will be extremely interesting to observe, in the years to come, if the favor may be returned and the fresh, vigorous and ambitious art of Latin America may be finally granted the authority to infuse some new life into the bloodstream of American and European culture.

“Interesting Phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another”
-Gregory Bateson

I had been working on three very distinct bodies of work for over four years when the need to put together an exhibition of “recent works” forced me to think about what these series had in common. In one of these series I used pure loose pigment to reproduce the images of familiar paintings as Tibetan mandalas gone berserk. In another, I used GPS guides, retro diggers and helicopters to produce and photograph gigantic earthworks that depicted extremely banal objects such as a pair of scissors, a saucepan or an electric outlet. A third group of works dealt with re-creating paintings depicting mythological characters using discarded goods, heaps of junk or garbage.

During my entire career I have always felt the need to work on different scales, methods and scenarios simultaneously to keep my interest alive on what I am doing as a whole. I try to do extremely different and disconnected things at the same time so one activity makes me miss the other paying no attention to the way ideas and concepts developed in one body of work instinctively penetrates another, no mater how it differs in material, scale and subject.

I asked Germano Celant, a great curator, art historian and friend to help me connect these last series into a somehow convincing format trusting his crafty ability to connect concepts and objects rather than believing in the existence of such associations. Germano, on the other hand didn’t have to scratch his head to think of an excuse for them to be together. With his characteristic nonchalant Italian eloquence, he told me, over the course of a bottle of wine, that it would be impossible for an artist, no matter how he tried, to work simultaneously on bodies of work that did not share a main central idea and the idea behind these works, although very general, was being made poignant and unique by the way that I was treating it in such different approaches: I was trying to define my relationship to the earth by the mapping of its borders.

All of a sudden the entire equation made sense to me; yes there was a common denominator, maybe one that unconsciously, I was fighting to deny because of its ubiquitous presence and overuse in popular culture. I was dealing with ecology all along, but with an ecology of the border spaces separating our minds from our immediate environments. In the pigment series, I was trying to point out that every human creation, no matter how fanciful or ideal, comes from the stuff of the earth. The Mona Lisa, the International Space Station, the paper the pen and the piano that helped Mozart communicate the creation of “The Magic Flute”, everything had to be produced from stuff dug from the ground, hence my unswerving need to display material somehow separated from subject. In these series, I was treating the earth as the only possible material, with its inexhaustible simplicity, flexibility and willingness to be shaped according to any human fantasy.

On the Pictures of Earthworks, I use the earth as a canvas, a support, perhaps saying that no matter how we try to distill the materiality that shapes our consciousness into a symbolic, linguistic environment, we are only left with that same primitive material canvas as the unexceptional means of fixing and transmitting our knowledge. If in the Pictures of Pigments, I was saying that every material in every human creation comes from the earth, here I am saying that all the human processes, techniques and languages can ultimately only be reflected on the environment where they were developed. In the pictures of Pigment, the vulgarization of the material, pointed to the possibility of a single primitive source of all materials, in the Pictures of Earthworks my intention is to treat the earth as a single unifying depository for all ideas and concepts; the source of all human activity can only be reflected in the way it leaves traces on its immediate environment. I wanted to bring Plato’s Cave to open air.

Ultimately, the Pictures of Junk and subsequently, the pictures of garbage, are a meditation on the effects of time on human activity. Everything we create, including thinking, produces an amazing amount of waste, and since we no longer have to stick to objects or ideas for a lifetime, we hide the unedited trace of our existences in containers, closets, attics, plastic bags, and hidden empty lots making us a distilled subtraction of what we no longer want to be. Working with garbage involves polluting a clean surface and cleaning it at the same time in order to end up with an image. The garbage here comes to represent the entropic chaos of nature, the loss of order and understanding due to an ungraspable complexity. When a figure or anything distinguishable emerges from this clutter, it is because of the cleaning and the reclaiming of the forged simplicity that lies beneath. All that mankind has accomplished in centuries of civilization was the separation of itself from this primitive chaos and clutter. The entirety of human knowledge was based on this kind of hygiene. What would happen when we can no longer separate ourselves from the waste we produce, when we will have to live with a less than ideal past that is not only a memory or a legacy but also a complex variety of immediate olfactory sensations and visual bewilderments? Until fairly recently, a society was being valued by what it was able to consume and waste. Would producing less rubbish make us less human? I have become fascinated by what we so desperately try not to be and what we are unavoidably becoming.

The earth was a theme, perhaps by then, the only possible theme, the source of all things and the end of all intellectual and material achievement. The only material and place for man to act and leave marks of uneven importance and effect. A scarred earth that is slowly becoming a massive residue of human significance, nevertheless the only reflex of our pale presence in the universe, where we see ourselves great, brave, and eternally beautiful, a beautiful earth.

I was born and raised in São Paulo, a city that not unlike Tokyo, Mumbai or Mexico City, exemplifies the struggle between the human drama and its set. Scarcity turns space and nature into valuable and expensive ideas. As I was finally installing The Beautiful Earth exhibition in Tokyo, I could not imagine a better place for it to be. In over a decade, Japan has placed itself as a great leader on environmental issues and despite of its being at the forefront of technological and industrial development, has kept a logical and productive dialogue with its natural environment. Japanese Culture’s extreme devotion to nature and simplicity has managed to prevail above material concerns in a way no other nation has managed to do it. Tokyo in particular, being the largest urban center in the planet has consistently produced intelligent solutions for waste and pollution management and control. I could not possibly be more grateful to the city of Tokyo and specially the entire staff of Tokyo Wonder Site for its unbounded energy enthusiasm and dedication to this project. I sincerely hope that this catalogue and exhibition will inspire others to think about their own relationship to nature at its most instinctive level. Only when this relationship is clearly defined, our thoughts about this beautiful earth will transcend the subject of mere survival and attain the dimension that will enable our thinking and our hearts to evoke real and lasting change.


Vik Muniz,


Rio de Janeiro, January, 2009.

As a graduate student at the respected M.I.T. Media Lab, Marcelo Coelho collaborated with the artist Vik Muniz to help him achieve a poetic and technical feat that teases the imagination: drawing a picture of a castle on a single grain of sand. After two years of failed experiments with various lasers, they finally began getting images of beautiful complexity using an electron microscope with a focused ion beam to etch superfine lines—when it didn’t pulverize the grains altogether. The tiny etchings could then be scanned and printed large scale.

“If you ever try to do something in a science lab that’s not science, people look at you in a really funny way,” said Mr. Coelho, who initially had to schmooze the gatekeeper to the multimillion-dollar microscope, which was designed to repair microchips (the pair settled for access in the wee hours). But once the lab technician saw their surprising results, in which the microscopic contours of the grains resemble mountainous landscapes, he offered more time on the machine and his own ideas for images they could make. “You could see the excitement percolating through the system,” said Mr. Coelho, who spent four years on the “Sandcastles” series.

Mr. Muniz is among the more than 30 artists, including Tomás Saraceno and Anicka Yi, invited to embed directly in the M.I.T. labs as equals with faculty and students since the creation of the school’s Center for Art, Science & Technology in 2012. It is supported by $3 million in grants from the Mellon Foundation and a recent $1 million gift from the Russian arts entrepreneur Dasha Zhukova for a new artist residency. CAST, as it is known, has revitalized an M.I.T. model begun in the late 1960s of bringing in artists to humanize technology and create more expansive-thinking scientists. M.I.T. is at the forefront of this cross-disciplinary movement with its institutional commitment, but it is drawing on a legacy of artists who are interested in science that dates back to Leonardo da Vinci and that has proliferated as technology has become ever more commonplace and accessible.

Images from “Sandcastles” are on view in Mr. Muniz’s midcareer retrospective of photographs made using unconventional materials and methods at the High Museum in Atlanta. It includes photographs of fluorescent bacteria and cancer cells choreographed into intricate designs from his “Colonies” series, also made at M.I.T. in collaboration with the bioengineer Tal Danino.

“They push the boundaries of what seems to be possible,” said Brett Abbott, the exhibition curator, who is contrasting photographs at microscopic scale alongside Mr. Muniz’s “Earthworks” series, which were drawn at monumental scale with bulldozers and shot from a helicopter. “There’s that moment of transformation where you’re looking at a picture of a motherboard, and all a sudden you realize you’re actually looking at bacteria. These M.I.T. pictures take Vik’s interest in scale and perception to a new extreme.”

Mutually beneficial collaborations have often taken each party into new territories in their fields.

Leila Kinney, executive director of CAST, said that good matches between artists and scientists “really contribute to the development of an artist’s work and also challenge our researchers.”

Mr. Muniz said he finds scientists to be imaginative yet with such a different focus from that of artists. “It can have broad repercussions for these people, who are extremely bright, to take a little vacation from their specific field of research or think of it in a different way,” he said. He was fascinated by how Mr. Danino engineered bacteria and cancer cells to glow with fluorescence to better track their organized behavior. The artist suggested using these vibrantly colored micro-organisms — cells that typically conjure chaos and fear in people — to make images of order, balance and beauty such as Victorian and Islamic patterns and circuit board designs.

“Vik said, ‘What you really want is an image that you can see as a whole but you can also see the individual constituents,’” Mr. Danino said. That meant taking pictures on the microscope at an extremely high resolution so that every nucleus of every single cell was visible on the blown-up print. But the method to make really complex patterns did not exist in the scientific literature, according to Mr. Danino. So he and Mr. Muniz invented a technique of making stencils out of collagen, a sticky growing medium on which the cells bind and proliferate to “paint” patterns.

Mr. Abbott believes these are “the first art pieces fabricated of trained virus cells.”

Mr. Muniz has been donating the proceeds of the sales from “Colonies” to cancer research. (A floral image from the series, made with liver cells infected with the vaccinia virus used to make the smallpox vaccine, was part of an online campaign sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote vaccination.)

“‘Colonies’ is a very concrete way that we built a technique for the art that’s useful for the science,” said Mr. Danino, who recently moved to Columbia University as director of the Synthetic Biological Systems Laboratory, which will publish his research.

Mr. Danino got pulled in a very different direction in his collaboration with Ms. Yi, a conceptual artist known for incorporating science and scent in her sculptural works. During her residency at M.I.T., Ms. Yi had the idea to explore what she called “the patriarchal fear” that lingers around hygiene and contagion, much of which she says is a gender-based stigma. Their collaboration involved creating a collective “female bacteria” for her exhibition at the Kitchen in New York last spring.

She mailed Q-tips and Ziploc bags to 100 of her female friends and colleagues and asked them to return bodily bacteria samples that Mr. Danino cultivated individually in the lab and then together in a giant petri dish on site at the Kitchen.

It was an uncontrolled experiment. A large amount of nutrient gel, heated in pots and pans on the Kitchen’s stove, was the wrong temperature, and they had to start over. Random things started growing in the petri dish from the nonsterile environment. “I saw Anicka using the bacteria almost like finger paints with her hands,” Mr. Danino said, noting that even though she was using rubber gloves, it was just something he would never do. “I had to calm down the scientific side and embrace that. It made the piece really nice in the end.”

The artist took an olfactory reading of the final sculpture and converted the pungent scent into a fragrance. It will be diffused in another sculptural installation to be included in the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea this fall.

Mr. Saraceno, who is known for making huge inflatable sculptures and complex gallery-size webs that can evoke floating cities, neural pathways and the infinitely expanding cosmos, was CAST’s inaugural visiting artist in 2012. He has continued to work actively with M.I.T. faculty exploring his utopian vision of flying around the world on one of his buoyant sculptures kept afloat only by the differential temperature between the air inside and outside a solar balloon. “The Earth becomes the big battery of the sculpture,” said Mr. Saraceno, who exhibited two prototypes of his giant silver Mylar balloons in “Solutions COP 21” at the Grand Palais in Paris during the climate change conference in December. He has successfully launched and kept them airborne for several hours with the help of scores of volunteers in recent test flights in Berlin, New Mexico and Bolivia that are part amateur science experiment, part performance art.

When the M.I.T. meteorologist Lodovica Illari first met Mr. Saraceno, she found his dream of alternative flight a bit far-fetched. “He began the conversation by asking, ‘If we were going to fly off on a balloon and ride a jet stream, where would we go?’” Ms. Illari said. “As a scientist, you want to be precise, correct. But he pushed me a little bit out of my comfort zone, saying, ‘Imagine something and see if it can be done.’”

She has embraced the proposition and has been working with him to analyze past flight trajectories of solar balloons and to simulate possible flights based on launching conditions and patterns of turbulence in the stratosphere. She plans to exhibit these during M.I.T.’s open house on April 23, celebrating the centennial of the university’s Cambridge campus. Her goal is to equip one of his solar balloons with an instrument that could sample the ozone throughout the day and night.

Mr. Saraceno, whose observation of spiders has inspired installations of webs made of elastic cord or monofilament, also collaborates with the M.I.T. civil engineer Markus Buehler, who studies the structure of the protein in spider silk as an ideal building material that could be replicated synthetically. Mr. Buehler had modeled two-dimensional webs only on the computer and was astounded by the artist’s photographs of a black widow spider’s web he had manually scanned millimeter by millimeter. They have since developed a scanning mechanism that tracks webs in three dimensions as they are being built.

“We’re working right now with Tomás on understanding how spiders build extremely complex shapes in open space without any scaffolding or help,” said Mr. Buehler, who has spiders building small cities in his M.I.T. basement. He imagines this research could be applied in the future to new architectural and engineering approaches.

Even when Mr. Saraceno careens off into flights of fancy, the scientists are tolerant.

“Tomás and I have pushed the boundaries in what we thought we could do,” Mr. Buehler said. “We ground ourselves when we actually get to work, but it’s important to be creative. That’s why I put Tomás and the students in the same room. They can learn from him as an artist to think wildly, and that’s necessary to solve a problem.”

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