At Carnegie Museum of Art, we are fortunate to have the Charmed Lab/Gigapan group at Carnegie Mellon University as next door neighbors. They’re developing Gigapan, a robotic camera mount that works with a simple digital camera, to take multi-gigapixel shots that can zoom from the breadth of a panorama to the micro details of a view. The mount is in its beta stage and our Gigapan friends have been testing Giga-applications on the Carnegie International.

They want to learn, for example, how to manipulate this technology in various conditions—like the lowlit/skylit galleries of the exhibition. We want to make Life on Mars available to everyone, including those who may not be able to travel to Pittsburgh to see the show, or those who may have seen the exhibition, but want to see it virtually again and again. Gigapanning the galleries offers our online visitors, whether in Pittsburgh or Patagonia, a look at the installation that can be taken from a full gallery view down to details so fine that you can examine the brushstroke on the paintings of Maria Lassnig, read the texts that have been taped to the walls of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Cavemanman, or zoom in on the laser-etched falling sheet of paper inside the crystal ball of Ryan Gander’s poetic A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor. 

They want to work on customizing the experience, testing a series of detailed snap shots that can have notes about this particular section of the view, written (in our case) by someone from the museum, or by you, the web visitor. And we want to provide a variety of ways for a person to approach the art in the International, including pointing out significant aspects in an artwork and offering a forum for response to an artwork.

After they work out the kinks, and if we promise we won’t break it, our Gigapan friends will let us handle a Gigapan device. We’ll learn how to take our own photos and make our own snapshot details, and they’ll investigate how easy it is for newbies like us to use the robot.

There’s still a lot of learning going on with the International, but you can see the first posted Gigapan image of Thomas Hirschhorn’s work.  Over time, working with our Gigapan partners, we’ll be loading more images onto our site.

If you go to the Gigapan website and search for “Carnegie International” you will be able to see additional views of the exhibition, and some of the issues that are being addressed with shooting in the galleries. You will also be able to see other Gigapan photos.

You never forget your first Gigapan view. Mine was of Paris. There in the distance, a little fuzzy in l’aire Parisienne was… Here, you look.

Tey Stitler, Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications