Remember their names by PHahn

Remember their names.
This is a mosaic experiment, and is still a work in progress.
The scene is of the Castro St Fair in 1978. The mosaic is based on a picture by Jerry Pritikin, and it is composed of 151,174 tiles taken from 5863 pictures of individual quilts of the NAMES Project - Aids Memorial Quilt. Each quilt is 12'x12' and typically contains 8 panels memorializing victims of the AIDS pandemic. There are over 48,000 panels and 94,000 names.

The quilt was on display last week in Washington DC on its 25th anniversary, so I thought I would put this together and post it. I created the mosaic with AndreaMosaic, which split the image into 16 parts because of its size. Then I used GIMP to piece it bake together. The result was a compromise between enough resolution to read the names on the individual panels, sharpness of the final image, file size, and computing power. I hope to make improvements, especially the sky which came out muddy, but I need more RAM. 8GB was barely enough.