Digital Artist Nancy Burson Collapses Border Between Mysticism and Physics

At first glance, Nancy Burson’s “Quantum Entanglement” paintings appear simply as white dots washing over black canvases in clusters and waves. Some dots resemble pairs of eyes; others appear as overlapping roundish figures. But when viewed as the 78-year-old artist intends—through a phone camera—the forms appear to jitter like static. Faint washes of color and a new sense of depth emerge. To Burson, the paintings—on view in the solo exhibition “Light Matter” at Heft Gallery through May 2—represent the emergent energy grid that is the fabric of the universe, which she believes it is her special gift to perceive. Like much of her work, they serve as a form of evidence, a way of asking viewers to see the enormity of what has been revealed to her.

“I was told, ‘Two up and two down, two up and two down,’” Burson told me, explaining the system by which she created the works. 

A pioneering artist in photography and digital art, Burson has had exhibitions at New York University’s Grey Art Museum and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and is represented 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 consists of oil paintings, video works, and sculpture, she was among the first artists to use digital technology in photography, becoming widely known in the 1980s for digitally blending groups of people to produce composite portraits of archetypal figures like businessmen or movie stars.

Burson’s career began when she moved to New York in 1968. She was twenty, living in a hotel with a famous (and married) musician, and had a vague plan to finish up college. Though she didn’t end up getting her degree, she found herself at the white-hot center of one of the most interesting moments in art history. Andy Warhol’s Factory was in its heyday, and the city was full of artist-run cooperative galleries, happenings, and new experiments in conceptual art. At the same time, great strides were being accomplished in the realm of personal computing. At one street art exhibition, Burson told an artist that she knew what she wanted to make but didn’t yet know how. 

“I want to make an age machine. I know it has something to do with computers and something to do with interaction,” Burson told the artist, who suggested she make a request to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the organization founded two years earlier by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. E.A.T.’s goal was to bring together artists and technologists; 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 led her down into his basement, where he had a large, early computer connected to a stylus that could be used to draw directly onto the screen. She picked up the stylus and drew a line.

“Is that it?” she asked him. “Is that all there is?”

“That’s all there is now. It’ll catch up to your idea pretty soon,” Machover replied.

Machover referred Burson to MIT, where Nicholas Negroponte was working on the Architecture Machine Group, a lab-think tank that served as a forerunner to the Media Lab, which he would establish with Jerome Wiesner in 1985. Negroponte paired Burson with Thomas Schneider, a molecular biologist who was designing computer programs to study DNA. Burson began visiting MIT on weekends to work on her age machine with Schneider, sleeping in the Margaret Cheney Reading Room, which kept a few cots and a shower for female students who needed to be close to the university’s libraries and laboratories. By 1981, Burson and Schneider were granted a patent titled “Method and apparatus for producing an image of a person’s face at a different age.” Their innovation was to develop a grid system through which images of faces could be transformed—a process that had taken four years to design.

In 1984, she applied the technology to age or de-age celebrities like Princess Diana, who was then in her early twenties, and the rest of the British royal family. But after her first exhibitions of these works led to an explosion of press coverage, the FBI asked Burson if it could adapt the technology to “update” images of missing children, to more accurately portray them if years had passed since their disappearance. In their first collaboration, Burson worked with the FBI and the parents of Etan Patz, a little boy who had gone missing in 1979 from the streets of SoHo, to age him from six years old to 13. While Patz was never found, the FBI later acquired Burson’s software for use in missing children cases.

It was this same technology that Burson used to create her “composite” portraits—abstract amalgamations of many different faces into one. In 1982, she made Androgyny (6 Men + 6 Women) and in 1983 Mankind (Oriental, Caucasian and Black weighted according to current population statistics). These images represent one of the main threads of Burson’s work: that we are not just composites of genetics but composites at the molecular, emotional, and temporal levels; that despite perceived differences in gender, race, or religion, there is a universal principle uniting us all. This tendency in her work aligned with the futuristic vision of the “global village” that accompanied globalization in the ‘90s and early 2000s. In one of the largest commissions of her career, Burson made a “Human Race Machine” for Zaha Hadid’s Millennium Dome in London in 2000. People lined up for hours to sit in a black box fitted with a screen and a camera, which would then morph one’s face into one of six types: East Asian, South Asian, Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, or white. The Human Race Machine traveled to New York in 2002 for her retrospective at the Grey.

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

Throughout this era of success, Burson was dealing with a profound series of medical issues that would come to shape her life and mind dramatically. From 1945 to 1971, pregnant mothers who wanted to prevent miscarriages were prescribed the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES). The drug was banned in 1971 after it was found to be causing extremely rare vaginal cancers in young women whose mothers had taken DES during pregnancy. Along with vaginal and breast cancers, women exposed to DES also sometimes suffered from vaginal, cervical, and uterine abnormalities, as well as infertility and ectopic pregnancies. They were also more likely to have miscarriages, premature births, or stillbirths. When these findings hit the news, Burson’s mother called her. “I think I took it,” she said.

Burson became pregnant with her son in 1989. Doctors watched her closely, and while she seemed to do well during the pregnancy, the birth had complications. Despite this, her son was born healthy, and she named him Keir after the actor who played astronaut David Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though both she and her son had survived this traumatic birth, they continued to suffer from various illnesses. Her son seemed immunocompromised and was constantly getting sick, while Burson dealt with painful stomach issues that limited her ability to eat. In the mid-1990s, she began to seek out healers from around the world. Her artistic practice changed in tandem. Leaving behind digital compositing, she picked up a film camera.

“When you’re ill—that’s when you go exploring,” Burson said.

Burson photographed healers, people with visible deformities, and the crop circles in England where she had been spending time. In one Polaroid she showed me, her preteen son holds hands with a towering blonde healer in front of one of the pillars of Stonehenge on a wild, windy day. She said she began to notice streaks of light showing up in her images of healers. One sound healer invited her to her home to see several beings of light that she said had begun to appear in the backyard.

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

Burson began regularly hosting “60 to 70” psychics for dinner parties in her SoHo apartment. People came over to watch a statue of the Virgin Mary dance in her bathroom. She began photographing orbs and attending orb conferences. She says the NSA was interested in her pictures. But Burson kept getting sicker. By 2008, she could stomach only a few bites of food in a sitting. It was at this time, she told me, that she began to hear a “collective voice” that she understands to be protons. This is also when she noticed strange substances accumulating around her—tiny spheres of amber-colored material that she has photographed extensively . In 2011 and 2012, she underwent a series of highly invasive surgeries to treat her stomach condition. It was after these surgeries, she explained, that a strange crystalline substance began to emerge from her hands and feet. She has also noticed a kind of glaze that accumulates on top of her clothing, plates, and apartment floors. She calls these crystals, pellets, and glazes Materials of Unknown Origins (MoUOs).

“The evidence I’ve been given is small,” Burson said. “But so is physics—it is made up of such small things.” Burson will appear in two films about UFOs this year.

Alongside her paintings and her early composite portraits on view at Heft, there is also a 2026 sculptural performance work titled Mary and the Quantum Spheres. In a small area in the gallery fitted with a blackout curtain, there are folding chairs and a small table, upon which sits a white statue of the Virgin Mary and two 3D-printed spheres. Inside the area, Burson asked me to play a song from my phone. I chose Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2. Burson turned off the lights, and the statue and the spheres began to glow. The Virgin Mary’s edges moved incessantly. Burson said I could film, and that way I could see the photons better, but I thought the screen would be an intrusive presence in that calm and meditative space. I regretted my decision later when I realized that Burson makes no distinction between nature and technology, the pure and the corrupted. I should have opened myself to her way of seeing. Technological mediums, whether an iPhone or computer software, are not just a way for Burson to “observe” the world, but a way to “get into it,” as her friend, 94-year-old photographer Duane Michals, told me later.

Mary and the Quantum Spheres is an altar to her religion of physics. It is also its proof. She believes that we are all guided, but that the protons happen to speak to her in plain English. They have told her that everything contains good and evil. That everything is predestined, that we are never wrong, but only led in the wrong direction by a being of light. That there is no free will, but that we must live “as if.” That these beings, born in the explosion of stars, love pyrotechnics, and that is why there is war. That these beings are not taking care of us right now, but that a better time is coming. That we should forgive each other, because “it’s not up to us.” That no one is alone, because we all exist together in the sea of particles.

“People come to this performance, and they say, yeah, you see this kind of stuff in the dark,” Burson said, referencing the glowing Mary, darting and morphing like a candle as the spheres grow slightly brighter. “And it’s like, yes, that’s it.”

Another tiny proof, right in front of us. Focus your eyes in the dark and watch the static bloom.