There's probably a program that translates images into Rubik's cube configurations. See the printed diagram in the same picture I mentioned in my previous post?
Someone probably spent a lot of money for this ....
... and had even more time
(even if these are cheap cubes, there are like 15x15 cubes in the first picture, and 16x23 cubes in the second picture, which are more or less 600 cubes!!! OMG!)
These cube artists most definitely manipulate the cubes to get them to their right configurations. See the WIP pictures in the first post? The cubes that have different colors are scrambled.