Art TED Fellows

One Million Bones on the National Mall, all countable in this gigapixel image

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One-Million-Bones-GigapixelIn the image above, one million handmade bones — made by schoolchildren and artists around the world — have been methodically laid across the National Mall in Washington, DC, from the US Capitol building all the way to the Washington Monument. The culmination of a five-year project from TED Fellow Naomi Natale (read our interview with her about it), thousands of volunteers placed the bones on the lawn during the weekend of June 8-10 as a protest against the unthinkable mass atrocities still taking place in our time in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, Syria and Somalia.

Photographer Jon Brack captured this haunting image of the scene — 1, 018,260 bones and not a person in sight — for GigaPan, a company that makes gigapixel panoramas. These super-high-resolution images – which were demonstrated in the social spaces of TEDGlobal 2013 — allow you to feel like you are swimming inside a scene. Click through to the image, and you’ll be able to move forward or backward in the scene, and zoom in to look at the tiniest detail of a single bone on the ground. You can pan the camera left or right and spin around to see the bones behind you.

Explore this powerful image here »