Tattooing One Dot for Every Casualty

Artist Wafaa Bilal will soon be getting a tattoo that contains 1 dot [wafaabilal.com] for every casualty associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom. The full-back tattoo will be applied during a 24 hour performance on March 8th in conjunction with a fundraiser aimed at collecting $1 per death towards scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost their parents in the war. Kyle McDonald designed the visualization for this remarkable tattoo, which contains more than 4.000 US soldiers in red ink, and more than 100.000 "invisible" civilians depicted in ultraviolet ink.
The process of visualizing the data involved a lot of research, including reconciling plain text descriptions containing GIS place names, warping the geographic coordinates to design for the landscape of the back, and distributing the deaths in an organic but respectful way. {via}