Vinzenz Aubry (SMACT ’25) is one of three winners of the 2025 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts. Aubry, and his fellow winners, work in media that bridges the stone age with the space age.
Ars longa, vita brevis. Life is fleeting while art endures. It’s not that every painting, sculpture, or installation aims or should aim for immortality. But good art, by its nature, lives simultaneously in the past, present, and future. It doesn’t matter whether it’s paint on canvas, digital imagery, or interactive video; good art fuses mind, matter, and skill to capture something both of our time and beyond our time. At its very best, art connects us with eternity.
Established in 1996 through the generosity of Harold and Arlene Schnitzer, the Schnitzer Prize is presented to current MIT students for excellence in a body of artistic work. Students submit a portfolio to be considered for the Schnitzer Prize. As graduate students, this year’s three winners will each receive an award of $5,000. Their work is featured in a Wiesner Student Art Gallery show running from May 27 – June 13, 2025.
Vinzenz Aubry SMACT ’25 already caught the public’s eye—or rather, his eyes caught the public—with Public Eyes, an interactive installation on display in the lobby of MIT Building 13 this spring as part of MIT’s campus-wide Artfinity Festival. The installation featured seven blocklike sculptures, deployed in a Stonehenge-like circle. Each sculpture had a digital screen displaying the eye of an alien creature. These eyes curiously looked at people as they moved across the lobby. “I wanted to renegotiate the idea of art in public spaces from a festival perspective,” says the artist. “And to question the gaze—these eyes that invite you—as a way to express curiosity, interest, and welcome.”
In Conjunktion, a nine-minute generative movie that changes each time it runs, Aubry trains a lens onto the sky to create a planetarium-like image that shows space trash instead of planets and stars. The film identifies constellations formed by various clusters of trash. “These objects are always present, but we usually can’t see them,” says Aubry. “This piece asks what meaning we might glean from examining them, what cultures might emerge in this totally man-made environment.”
Platform, Vibrations, Androids | Wiesner Student Art Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Vibrations for Androids is an infrasonic installation. A platform, a low hum, a body listening with the skin. Two people lie head to head. Between them: a slow pulse of the world. What cannot be heard moves through deep vibrations below the threshold of hearing. Sound without sound.
The body listens. What arrives are the slow tremors of the planet: tectonic drift, whale calls crossing oceans, the deep pulse of militarized earth. There is no image, no score, no direction—only the pressure of presence. A signal not for the ear but for the spine. Listening becomes feeling.
The installation occupies a space where the known begins to flicker. Not silence, but the vibration of things too slow, too vast, too old. An audition of what lies beneath recognition. It does not matter if you believe in it. The body already knows.
Custom Software, MDF, Screens, Cameras | MIT Lobby 13, Cambridge, MA
In this generative video installation, viewers are presented with a digital interface which transforms into a meditation on observation and self-awareness. As participants approach, they encounter an unknown entity of digital avatars looking outwards. They carefully track their movements, creating an immediate and visceral sense of visual dialogue with the Other. Quite the opposite of surveillance, this is an invitation to explore the complex dynamics of seeing and being seen.
Through public mediation, drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas’s concept of the Other, Michel Foucault’s theories of observation and power, and Ad Reinhardt’s consideration of the Black Square, the installation examines: Who is really watching who? An eye is not only watching, but acts as a mirror, reflecting our physical presence and our internalized patterns of self-observation.
The installation plays with what physiologists call “coenesthesia” – our immediate awareness of our own bodies in space and time. As viewers engage with the work, they become simultaneously spectator and performer, observer and observed, creating a dynamic feedback loop that challenges notions of spectatorship.
Funded by the Council for the Arts, the Office of the Arts and the department of Architecture at MIT.
More info: Public Eyes
Liquid-crystal display, Flashes, Video, Your eyes | ACT Gallery, Cambridge MA
This video installation evolves on the audience’s retinas as afterimages. The film processes the memory of witnessing the full eclipse in upstate New York 2024 and how the experience of light and the absence of light in itself negotiate violence. Is there a way to see beyond light?
This work is part of the Flashwork series which use the retina as a direct canvas.
More info: Looking at the Sun
Custom Buoys and Fins, Paint, Rope | Charles River, Watertown, MA
This sculpture studies the structural This sculpture studies the structural invisibility and dependence of the flowing waters around us. It examines our relationships and interactions with them, shedding light on their global transformation in the process of human “modernization”. The underestimation of their value and interconnectedness with all systems on our planet – be it ecological, economic or cultural. They are transportation routes, centers of settlement, green environments and witnesses of the passage of time.
What does it truly mean to touch the rivers today: Is it a literal touch, a cultural connection, a rediscovery of the memories embedded in their topography? The riverbed they’re sculpting or the flow ever more often drying up or flooding?
The initial manifestation takes the form of public buoy sculptures deployed along the Charles River – a waterway, like many others, too polluted for recreational swimming. As these buoys navigate public space, they co-share their aquatic realm with many surface-dwelling creatures: water striders, duckweed, whirligig beetles, algae, but also cargo, sailing, and rowing boats.
How do you touch the river?
More info: Touch Me
