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An executed murderer whose body was famously sectioned for the Visible Human Project has been resurrected in ghostlike form in a new series of layered photographs.

Project 12:31 reassembles the corpse of Texas killer Joseph Paul Jernigan, who was put to death by lethal injection in 1993. Jernigan’s body was documented using computed tomography and magnetic resonance imagery after his execution, then sliced into 1,871 axial cross-sections, each about 1 millimeter in thickness. The images from the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project were then distributed via discs and eventually, the internet.

“I’d been doing a lot of long-exposure film projects,” said Croix Gagnon, the 29-year-old creator of Project 12:31, in a phone interview with Wired.com. “I was surfing Wikipedia and found the Visible Human Project, and knew it would be perfect source data.”

In the years since the Visible Human Project hit the internet, many people, including doctors at the University of Vienna, have spoken out about the ethics of digitizing Jernigan’s corpse. The condemned man had only consented to donate his body to science, not knowing the expanse of the project.

Gagnon said the ethical questions added to the allure of Project 12:31. “What I thought was crazy,” he said, “was [Jernigan] was executed and yet had no way of knowing all this would happen to his body and that all this data about him would be around, seemingly forever.”

“The only limiting factor was keeping the human form, but not keeping it literal.”

To produce Project 12:31’s spooky images, a video of a longitudinal descent down Jernigan’s body was played on a laptop screen. Moving the computer in practiced patterns in front of an open camera shutter, photographer Frank Schott captured the ghoulish-looking smears in a studio. After about 150 takes, he and Gagnon settled on seven patterns to overlay on dark, barren scenes from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The only limiting factor was keeping the human form, but not keeping it literal,” Gagnon said of Project 12:31’s eerie images. “We didn’t want them to be gross or scary, but beautiful and have the viewer be sucked into Jernigan’s story. We wanted recognizable features, but without making it too explicitly human.”

See images from Project 12:31, as well as a video of the source material, in the gallery above.