Soooooo this happened today, and in addition to throttling our Twitter mentions, we’ve been alerted to some fantastic threads we somehow overlooked, including this amazing rug from Jaime Odabachian’s eponymous family business. Odabashian was founded in 1921 by Jaime’s Armenian grandfather, and the company’s mission is to weave stories through design, literally.
As Jaime explained in his email to us:
The rug was produced in a hand-tufted technique and is a tribute to the work of the discovery of the first Pulsar by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish in 1967 and the subsequent use by Peter Saville of the image to design the iconic “Unknown Pleasures” album cover by Joy Division.
We exhibited the rug at Zona Maco Art fair in 2017 and they are available on a made-to-order basis.
Pulsars are the surviving remnants of supernova explosions, rapidly spinning neutron stars emitting a beamed column of light (like a lighthouse) along one axis while rotating around another axis. The rug features 80 successive periods of the first pulsar observed, CP1919, stacked on top of one another. The original image was produced at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico.
If you aren’t already familiar with the image, this article via Scientific American goes deep into the origin of the design. And this short YouTube video explains how the pulsar data came to be transformed into the classic Joy Division album cover which took on a life of its own (including this DIY version!). Lastly, Summer wrote about both pulsars and Dame Jocelyn Bell for Syfy Wire last year.
You can follow Odabashian on Instagram and Facebook, and be sure to check out our other pulsar themed posts here.
- Summer & Emily
