Public art, especially murals, can be fleeting. But Pittsburgh native Richard Palmer, a longtime collaborator with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, has spent the last five years using innovative CMU technology to ensure the city’s art and public murals won’t be lost to history.
The interactive Pittsburgh Public Art archive map uses yellow pins to mark locations of art installations.
Housed on the CREATE Lab website, the Pittsburgh Public Art archive is a digital hub for murals and large-scale multimedia artwork that define neighborhoods across the city. Visitors can explore art installations at extraordinary resolution, zooming in on precise details that would be difficult to see even in person. What makes that experience possible is a suite of imaging technologies developed at the CREATE Lab that allow these public artworks to be captured, preserved and shared on a large scale.
At the core of the archive is Gigapan, a robotic panoramic imaging system developed by CREATE Lab researchers that creates ultra-high-resolution images. Over time, Gigapan has transformed the archive from a collection of photographs into a dynamic record of Pittsburgh’s evolving visual landscape.
While Palmer has spent recent years documenting the city’s public art, his relationship with the CREATE Lab and Gigapan dates back to 2007, when he was living and working in Honolulu. While keeping up with Pittsburgh news, he spotted an advertisement in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette indicating that the CREATE Lab was developing a new panoramic photography system. After several unsuccessful attempts to connect, Palmer sent the lab something memorable: a five-stanza poem set to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island.” The message caught the attention of the CREATE Lab’s Illah Nourbakhsh and Randy Sargent. Within months, Palmer received an early alpha unit of the Gigapan system, marking the beginning of a collaboration that continues to this day.
Palmer’s interest in large-scale imaging is tied to his scientific background. He joined the Hawaii State Department of Health after earning his Ph.D. in Botany at the University of Hawaii. During his role as a conservation biologist, he documented different habitats in the state –– urban, rural and undeveloped native environments. The work required detailed documentation at a high scale, making the CREATE Lab’s emerging panoramic technology a natural fit.
The Palmer-CREATE Lab collaboration expanded when Palmer received an Outreach for Science Fellowship from the Pittsburgh Fine Family Foundation. The fellowship sent him to teach in Estes Park, Colorado, and also back to Pittsburgh, where he worked with other scientists to incorporate Gigapan technology into their daily research practices. Palmer trained researchers across disciplines, demonstrating how high-resolution panoramic imaging could support environmental monitoring, scientific analysis and public communication. In 2011, Nourbakhsh invited him to become a CREATE Lab sponsored visitor, a role he still holds today.
At the heart of Palmer’s work is Gigapan’s technical precision. Rather than relying on a single wide-angle shot, the system uses a programmable robotic camera mount that moves through a defined grid. Any high-quality camera can be mounted on the device, which then automatically advances and triggers the shutter hundreds to thousands of times. Specialized CREATE Lab software then stitches those images together into a seamless composite with shockingly high resolution.
“It’s not the camera, it’s the mount,” Palmer said. “You can use your own high-end camera and lens. The Gigapan controls how the camera moves and how the images come together.”
That technology became central to the Public Art Archive in 2021, when the Hill District Community Development Corporation approached the CREATE Lab with an urgent request to document a culturally significant mural “Looking Through a Keyhole Into a Jazz Club” before it was permanently covered. The CREATE Lab pointed them to Palmer, whose Gigapan experience made him uniquely suited to the task.
The resulting image did more than preserve a single mural. It allowed viewers to zoom deeply into the artwork, preserving details and context long after the physical wall was covered. The project revealed how Gigapan could serve not only scientific research, but cultural preservation as well.
After documenting the jazz club piece and several other murals in the Hill District, Palmer began asking a broader question: What about the rest of the city’s murals? With support from the CREATE Lab, Palmer expanded the effort, beginning to systematically photograph murals across Pittsburgh.
And the Public Art Archive was born.
The growing digital collection now spans neighborhoods Palmer had never previously explored, from Lawrenceville and the Strip District to Bloomfield and the North Side. He captures each mural using the same high-resolution Gigapan process, allowing art installations to live on in an accessible location.
A Gigapan image captures a mural by artist Kyle Holbrook on the side of the Roberto Clemente museum in the Strip District. Click the image to view.
As the archive expanded, so did the need for sustained organization and maintenance. Josh Ambush, who manages the CREATE Lab website, works closely with Palmer on the archive’s design and coordination. Ambush helped develop the project’s interactive mapping infrastructure using Google My Maps and oversees the CREATE Lab webpage where the collection is hosted, supporting its continued growth and accessibility.
Palmer sees the archive as an ongoing, evolving project. “Every year, there’s something new,” he said. “Eventually, I’ll hand it off to someone else.” His long-term vision is for the archive to expand beyond Pittsburgh, becoming a national model for public art documentation.
For the CREATE Lab, the Public Art Archive reflects a core philosophy: technology should empower people, support communities and preserve knowledge that might otherwise be lost.
“Explorable images like GigaPans are a truly unique technology. They empower us to not just look, but to zoom and pan, exploring an image as if we’re walking next to the mural, crossing the street to see its details up close,” Nourbakhsh said. “We hope these images bring Pittsburghers closer together. They are truly extraordinary works of art that we should all celebrate.”
To learn more and interact with the Pittsburgh public art map, visit the CREATE lab website.
For More Information: Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu