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.