Digital Artist Nancy Burson Collapses Border Between Mysticism and Physics

At first glance, Nancy Burson’s “Quantum Entanglement” paintings appear to be just white dots washed up in clusters and waves on a black canvas. Some dots resemble a pair of eyes; Others appear as overlapping circular shapes. But when viewed through a cell phone camera, as the 78-year-old artist intended, the shapes appear to jitter like static. A hint of color and a new sense of depth appear. For Boya, these paintings—on view in the solo show “Light Matter” at Heft Gallery until May 2—represent the emerging grid of energy as the fabric of the universe, which she believes is her special gift for perception. Like many of her works, they function as a form of evidence, a way of asking the viewer to see the enormity of what she reveals.

“I was told, ‘Two up, two down, two up, two down,'” Bosson told me, explaining her system for creating her work.

A pioneering artist in photography and digital art, Boya has exhibited at NYU’s Gray Museum of Art and MIT’s List Center for the Visual Arts, and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. While her current body of work includes paintings, video works and sculptures, she was one of the first artists to use digital technology in photography, becoming widely known in the 1980s for digitally blending crowds of people to create composite portraits of archetypal figures such as businessmen or movie stars.

Burson’s career began in 1968 when he moved to New York. She was twenty years old, living in a hotel with a famous (married) musician, and had a vague plan to finish college. Although she ultimately didn’t earn a degree, she found herself at the height of one of the most interesting moments in art history. Andy Warhol’s Factory was in its heyday, and the city was buzzing with artist-run collaborative galleries, events, and new experiments in conceptual art. At the same time, great strides were being made in personal computing. At a street art exhibition, Boya told an artist that she knew what she wanted to create, but not yet how.

“I wanted to make an age machine. I knew it had to do with computers and it had to do with interaction,” Boesen told the artist, suggesting that she submit a request to Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), an organization founded two years ago by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. The goal of EAT was to bring together artists and technical experts; they connected Burson with Carl Machover, an early innovator in computer graphics. Burson visited him in White Plains, New York, where he was living while working with radar manufacturer Norden Systems. He took her into his basement, where he had a large early computer with a stylus attached that could be used to draw directly on the screen. She picked up the stylus and drew a line.

“Is that so?” she asked him. “Is that all?”

“That’s all for now. It’ll soon catch up with your thoughts,” Machover replied.

Machover introduced Burson to MIT while Nicholas Negroponte was working in MIT’s Building Machines Group, a laboratory think tank that was the precursor to the Media Lab he founded with Jerome Wisner in 1985. Negroponte paired Boya with Thomas Schneider, a molecular biologist who was designing computer programs to study DNA. Boya began visiting MIT on weekends, working on her age machine with Schneider, sleeping in the Margaret Cheney Reading Room, which had several beds and a shower room for female students who needed to be near the university’s libraries and laboratories. In 1981, Boya and Schneider were granted a patent titled “Method and apparatus for generating images of human faces at different ages.” Their innovation was the development of a grid system through which facial images could be transformed – a process that took four years to design.

In 1984, she applied the technique to aging or de-aging celebrities such as Princess Diana, then in her early twenties, and other members of the British royal family. But after she first exhibited the works, which generated widespread media coverage, the FBI asked Boya if the technology could be used to “update” images of missing children to more accurately depict them years after their disappearance. In their first collaboration, Boya worked with the FBI and the parents of Etan Patz, a young boy who disappeared from the streets of SoHo in 1979, to adjust him from the age of 6 to 13. Although Patz was never found, the FBI later purchased Burson’s software for use on missing child cases.

Boya uses this same technique to create her “composite” portraits – abstract fusions of many different faces into one. In 1982 she produced Hermaphroditic (6 males + 6 females) and 1983 Humans (Orientals, Caucasians, and Negroes, weighted according to current demographics). These images represent one of the main threads of liberal arts research: that we are complexes not just of genetics but of molecular, emotional, and temporal levels; that despite obvious differences in gender, race, or religion, there is a universal principle that unites us all. This tendency in her work is consistent with the futuristic vision of the “global village” that accompanied globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2000, in one of the largest commissions of his career, Burson-Marsteller created a “human racing machine” for Zaha Hadid’s Millennium Dome in London. People queue for hours and sit in a black box equipped with a screen and camera, which then transforms the person’s face into one of six categories: East Asian, South Asian, black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern or white. In 2002, The Human Race Machine traveled to New York for a retrospective exhibition at Gray Gallery.

“I could never do it now,” Boya said. “But no one complained at the time.”

During this era of success, Boya has been dealing with a series of profound medical issues that have greatly impacted her life and thinking. From 1945 to 1971, pregnant women who wanted to prevent miscarriage were given the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES). The drug was banned in 1971 after it was found to cause an extremely rare form of vaginal cancer in young women whose mothers took DES during pregnancy. In addition to vaginal and breast cancer, women exposed to DES sometimes develop vaginal, cervical, and uterine abnormalities, as well as infertility and ectopic pregnancies. They are also more likely to have a miscarriage, premature birth or stillbirth. When the findings became news, Boya’s mother called her. “I think I took it,” she said.

In 1989, Burson became pregnant with her son. Doctors kept her under close observation, and although she seemed to be doing well during her pregnancy, complications arose during delivery. Despite this, her son was born healthy and she named him Keir after the actor who played astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s film. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although both she and her son survived the painful birth, they still suffered from various ailments. Her son appeared to be immunocompromised and was often sick, while Boya faced stomach pains that limited her ability to eat. In the mid-1990s, she began searching for therapists around the world. Her artistic practice changed accordingly. She ditched digital compositing and picked up a film camera.

“When you’re sick, that’s when you explore,” Boya said.

Boya photographed therapists, visibly deformed people and the crop circles she spent time in Britain. In a Polaroid she showed me, her teenage son held hands with a tall, blond therapist in front of a pillar at Stonehenge on a wild and windy day. She said she began to notice streaks appearing in the therapist’s images. A sound healer invited her to her home to see several light bodies, which she said had begun to appear in the backyard.

“I don’t believe her,” Boeson said. But when she visited, she saw “huge red energy streaks” that changed her mind. She said her only thought was: How do I incorporate this into my life?

Boya began hosting regular dinner parties at her SoHo apartment for “60 to 70” psychics. People came to watch the statue of the Virgin Mary dance in the bathhouse. She began photographing spheres and attending sphere meetings. She said the NSA was interested in her photos. But Boya’s condition continued to worsen. By 2008, she could only eat a few mouthfuls of food at a time. It was at this time, she told me, that she began to hear a “collective voice” that she believed to be protons. This was also when she noticed a strange substance building up around her – she photographed numerous small spheres of amber-colored substance. In 2011 and 2012, she underwent a series of highly invasive surgeries to treat stomach problems. She explained that it was after these surgeries that a strange crystalline substance began to appear from her hands and feet. She also noticed a glaze building up on her clothes, dishes and apartment floor. She calls these crystals, particles and glazes materials of unknown origin (MoUO).

“I got very little evidence,” Boya said. “But so is physics – it’s made of things so small.” Boya will appear in two movies about UFOs this year.

In addition to her paintings and her early composite portraits on display at Heft, there is also a 2026 sculptural performance piece titled Mary and the Quantum Sphere. A small area of ​​the gallery, furnished with blackout curtains, is furnished with folding chairs and a small table, on which sits a white statue of the Virgin Mary and two 3D-printed spheres. While in the area, Boya asked me to play a song on my phone. I chose Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony. Boyasson turned off the lights, and the statue and orb began to glow. The edges of the Virgin Mary are constantly moving. Boya said I could film so I could see the photons better, but I thought the screen would invade that calm and meditative space. I later regretted my decision when I realized that Boya made no distinction between nature and technology, purity and corruption. I should be open to her perspective. As her friend Duane Michals, a 94-year-old photographer, later told me, technological media, whether an iPhone or computer software, were for Burson not just a way of “seeing” the world but a way of “entering it.”

Mary and the Quantum Sphere It is the altar of her religion of physics. This is also proof of it. She believed we were all guided, but Proton happened to speak to her in plain English. They told her that there was good and evil in everything. Everything is doomed, we are never wrong, we are just led in the wrong direction by the existence of light. There is no free will, but we must live “as if”. These creatures, born from star explosions, love fireworks, and that’s the reason for war. These creatures are not looking after us now, but better times are coming. We should forgive each other because “it’s not up to us.” No one is alone because we all exist together in a sea of ​​particles.

“People come to the show and they say, yes, you see this in the dark,” Boesen said, referring to the glowing Mary, who darts and morphs like a candle as the orb becomes slightly brighter. “It’s like, yeah, that’s it.”

Another tiny piece of evidence is right in front of us. Focus your eyes on the darkness and watch the static bloom.