More and more every day, data visualization is proving its merits, not just as a cognitive crutch for comprehending a new world of big data, but for illustrating a point with grace. It shares the secrets of math and science while championing the aesthetics of the arts.

Over 30 years ago, designer Peter Saville crafted the album cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. It’s a somewhat stark set of packaging, but in the middle sits a mysterious series of lines and peaks. The small scrap of ink is oddly full of intent. You can almost sense the meaning–information hidden in plain sight–in its sporadic pattern, and so in an era when memes were tattoos rather than Reddit threads, the album cover became a cult icon.

In this fantastic short, Saville talks about creating the album cover, lifting the image verbatim from a science book depicting the very first reading of a pulsar from 1967.

There is another, guttural level of mystery to it all, though. When pulsars were first discovered, their measurable emissions were so strictly intervaled (ticking like a clock–hence the Pulsar brand of watches), that scientists couldn’t ignore the possibility that they could have been created by a distant intelligent species to serve as lighthouses across the cosmos.

So when someone looks at Unknown Pleasures and doesn’t really know what they’re looking at, they actually can re-create a very specific place and time in science, when the Universe sent mankind a signal that we didn’t yet understand.

The video is in promotion of the upcoming Visualized conference. Read more here.