Two stories of discovery are relevant to this work. The first concerns Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered CP1919, the first pulsar, in 1967. Her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for the discovery. Bell's role was only acknowledged years later.
The second story concerns the cover of the album
Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. Legend has it that Stephen Morris was thumbing through
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy and came across an image which he suggested Peter Saville use for the cover of the album. The image in question was a graph of the signals from CP1919.
This work was shown on
Lucky PDf's TV channel, which was part of
Yes Way 2010, at AutoItalia, London from Friday 13th to Sunday 15th August 2010.
Commissioned and curated by
Chris Fite-Wassilak.