The first installation of Mural comprised a network of white walls on the 4th floor of the Whitney Museum that interleaved the retrospective exhibition, Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio. A dissident robot, designed in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics, traveled on a continuous track along the major partition walls of the galleries and sabotaged the visual and acoustic isolation they produce. Decommissioned after Mural, the drill was revived for the May 2010 premiere exhibition at the MAXXI museum in Rome.
For the MAXXI, the drill was given a new task: to make a slow-speed wall-etching over the course of the show. For this iteration, titled Drill Baby Drill, the robot was translated into a dotmatrix engraving device. Rather than drilling through the MAXXI wall, the drill perforated the surface with holes of variable depth and size to produce the equivalent of a photographic screen. The intelligent drill produced a mural depicting one of the greatest man-made environmental disasters in history: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Guided by an intelligent navigator, the robot randomly selects a point within a three-dimensional matrix of coverage and guides the drill to the location. The drill pierces the surface of drywall leaving a variable-sized hole. The holes initially begin as lone blemishes on the pristine walls but as the exhibition continues, the walls become increasingly perforated and an image emerges. As clusters of holes randomly open up sections of surface, the wall appears increasingly unstable; it gradually becomes possible for visitors to find views beyond the pristine surface. The long-term performance work progressively contaminates the galleries with a constant background drone, visual distractions, and light leaks. Rather than securing a neutral background for the art works on display, the white walls actively compete for attention, thus resisting total submission to the collecting and mediating function of the museum.
