t is the names of the dead that people remember . . . and the somber walk through vast fields of fabric commemorating more than 70,000 lives lost to AIDS -- more than the total number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. Now weighing 36 tons and stretching over 12 football fields, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has been unfurled in its entirety only four times since the first rectangles of cloth were stitched together in 1989. (The fifth showing is scheduled for October 1996, in the same place where the other exhibits have taken place: the Mall in Washington, D.C.)
Each display of the quilt has a double mission: to celebrate the lives of those who have died, and to educate the living about the epidemic. But these goals cannot be achieved if people aren't able to view the nearly 30,000 handmade panels.
Until recently, the simple and gripping lessons of the quilt were available only to those who could attend a display. But in 1994, San Francisco-based, The NAMES Project Foundation, which sponsers the quilt, began the Archive Project, a plan to create a digital photographic record of each panel and every piece of supporting commemorative material.
Working with Luna Imaging of Southern California, the NAMES Project is developing both a website and a CD-ROM. Soon millions of people around the world will be able to take their own quiet stroll among the panels, to glimpse the enormity of the loss, person by person, and to say the names of the dead and remember.
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