story 003 · music · joy division, 1979
this album cover is a graph of a dead star.
the short, written out
this is one of the most famous album covers ever made. it’s a graph.
every line is a radio pulse from a dead star, a pulsar, that spins once every 1.3 seconds.
in 1967, a 24-year-old phd student, jocelyn bell, spotted it as a bit of scruff on her chart. the signal was so regular they nicknamed it lgm-1: little green men.
an astronomer, harold craft, stacked 80 of its pulses into this plot. it ended up in an astronomy encyclopedia, where joy division found it.
peter saville printed it white on black. no band name. no title.
the nobel prize for the discovery went to her supervisor, not to her. in 2018 she won three million dollars, and gave all of it to students who want to become physicists.
the print that goes with it
wave forms
black & beige, moiré line landscape, hypnotic monochrome
no. 180 · a4 · 8.27″×11.69″ to a1 · 23.3″×33.1″ · from $24.00 · see the print
sources
- wikipedia, psr b1919+21
- wikipedia, jocelyn bell burnell
- wikipedia, unknown pleasures
- scientific american, “pop culture pulsar: origin story of joy division’s unknown pleasures album cover” (2015)
every sentence of the short was checked against its sources before it went out.
