A pulsar is the remnant of a collapsed star that continues to emit an electromagnetic pulse as its life ebbs away, creating a ‘death line’ over 10 to 100 million years until it dies. Sharma has obtained radiographs of different pulsars from an astrophysicist and plotted the data lines into three-dimensional landscape of ridges, peaks and valleys. Using technology to poetically talk about time and space, memory and sensation, this work addresses humankind’s preoccupation with the extraterrestrial and the afterlife. This is a specially created 3-D rendering and a ‘flythrough’ scene of the actual physical work, employing cinematic techniques of navigation and long overhead takes to create unique temporal and spatial effects.

Lovell is named after the Lovell telescope in Jodrell Bank (UK) that discovered the pulsar B1237+25 in 1969. It was also the first time a mode-change was identified in 1970, where the pulse shape changed. Mode changes are the phenomenon that the emission characteristic of a pulsar can switch between two (or more) different states. So for example in one state emission can be seen at rotational phases where normally there is no emission at all.