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Aaron Penne

"Receive Transmission" embodies the echoes of Peter Saville's iconic album cover, of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, and the powerful vibrations of Joy Division's music. Ripples radiate from the central core channeling the spinning pulsar. These stars exhibit symmetry, with two beams extending on either side, similar to a lighthouse's sweep. The composition follows a bending grid, similar to the paper that aided Jocelyn's work. Occasionally this grid is exposed as an overlay, a testament to the barriers confronting women and their ability to overcome them. There is a rhythmic cadence to the artwork, sometimes steady like Stephen Morris' drums or jagged and spontaneous like Ian Curtis' dance. From the distant pulses of a dying star to the timeless grooves on a vinyl record, the artwork encapsulates the endless ripples through time. A transmission received by all who look for it.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the pioneering scientist who discovered pulsars, was the sole woman radio astronomer at Cambridge University in 1967. She helped build a satellite and operated it alone, carefully studying the marks made by a pen across thousands of feet of graph paper. Jocelyn uncovered a mark that should not have been there. This signal, a transmission received from a perished star, continues to traverse time and space to wash our world in radio waves for eons to come.

Her discovery was initially overshadowed by her professor's skepticism, who attributed the anomaly to interference or faulty wiring. To validate her intuition that this was a new celestial entity, Jocelyn continued working and discovered a second pulsar. Her work earned a Nobel Prize; however that prize was given to the male heads of her program. In 2018 when Jocelyn was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her pulsar discovery. She promptly donated the $3 million award to the Institute of Physics (IoP) to propel women and other underrepresented groups toward earning PhDs in physics. Her impact as a role model will carry on for generations.

It is fitting that Joy Division's album cover for Unknown Pleasures displays a chart of the pulsar which Jocelyn discovered. There are parallels of Jocelyn's story to Joy Division's fleeting yet impactful time, leaving an indelible mark on the way we experience the world.


Receive Transmission

__Tell us about the how your work created for “Notes From a Neutron Star” is connected to Peter Saville’s iconic cover for “Unknown Pleasures.”__

There are several parallel themes: echoes from a distant star and the echo of Ian Curtis’ powerful voice reaching people far removed in time and space, the steady pulsating drums of Stephen Morris and the steady pulse of the star’s radiation, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of the pulsar during a short period of time altered how we see the universe as Joy Division’s short existence changed the face of music, the grooves in vinyl and the lines drawn on the graph paper during CP1919’s discovery in 1967, the monolithic feel of the image on Unknown Pleasures and the central symmetrical focus of “Receive Transmission”, and ultimately the power and energy of Joy Division’s music has been condensed into the album cover and into my work as diligently as possible. The artwork description captures the connection best, I recommend reading it.

__How does this work reflect the direction that your artistic practice is going?__

I have been iterating on the techniques used in “Receive Transmission” for 5 years, iterating through possible coding tools (python, javascript, glsl, etc) and approaches to reach a signature style. This project is a culmination of that work, exerting some measure of control to achieve a rhythm and repetitive structure that I have been seeking for some time. Incorporating human stories and music and the power of universal observations is at the heart of my practice, and channeling that through this technical capability allows me to push generative work in new directions.

__What role does music and other forms of media play in inspiring you throughout your creative process?__

Music is a critical element of my creative process, I use it to shape the mood which in turn shapes the aesthetic direction of a particular project or session. I have worked closely with Boreta to create wide ranging projects that merge generative synthesized audio with visual generative work, creating site-specific installations that operate as sound+vision baths. Art to me is about engaging the audience through their senses, and music has the most direct line.

__What has been the most rewarding aspect of your artistic career thus far?__

Working with a wide range of incredible artists, curators, collectors, appreciators, and people who thought they had no interest in artwork but have come to love it. There are more unique voices than there are people, and each one enriches our world. I’m fortunate to be in the middle of it as an artist and as a leader within Art Blocks, doing what I can to elevate those around me.

__What’s next for you and your art? What are you excited about for the rest of the year?__

The idea of “next work” is infinite, there is no shortage of fascinating paths to explore with systems. Currently I am working on a project with Herbert Franke’s estate, diving into my own aesthetic research, and beginning two collaborations which will grow into fruitful experiments. There is always more to learn and more to give, and I am excited to embrace those challenges passionately. 


Behind the Work with Aaron Penne

Jesse Woolston Avatar

Jesse Woolston

Instability draws inspiration from the universal law governing the interactions of gas states. By observing supernova explosions, pulsar gas jets, and the effects of various gravitational forces with different density weights, the piece transitions from intricate micro-movements to a simplistic balance between two major forms. The piece emphasizes and demonstrates the evolving beauty throughout the simulation's duration, as well as how these gases behave in linear motion.

Instability Large

__Tell us about how your work created for “Notes From a Neutron Star” is connected to Peter Saville’s iconic cover for “Unknown Pleasures.”__

Seeking to connect to the source and build upon the artwork, Instability is a simulation that observes the behavior of gasses and plasma, interacting in and around CP1919. 

__How does this work reflect the direction that your artistic practice is going?__

My artistic endeavors concentrate on quantifying and simulating universal laws, embodying the physics of the universe through beauty and aesthetics. 'Instability' provides a space to articulate the dimensions of art, music, science, and the cosmos as a cohesive whole. 

__What role do music and other forms of media play in inspiring you throughout your creative process?__ 

Each sense or medium presents an opportunity to convey concepts effectively, with an awareness of its unique linguistic construction. Music, philosophy, and visual art are highly significant examples that inform the creative process. Every dimension my work touches should possess a well-developed intention. For instance, with my background in music, I consistently integrate the concept through composition and sound design to unify the senses and create a thoroughly developed work.

__What has been the most rewarding aspect of your artistic career thus far?__

Over the last 15 years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with museums, large scale public artworks, couture houses, and universities. What continues to nourish my soul is learning about the beautiful complexity of our universe through the minds of scientists, then working as intensely as possible to express my excitement and love for these phenomena through the arts.

__What’s next for you and your art? What are you excited about for the rest of the year?__

I am continuing to develop and expand the many dimensions of my practice through public artworks and experiences, while also cultivating relationships with a group of art collectors and enthusiasts. The excitement and focus are beginning to merge the various aspects of my practice in a more intimate way, as I consider the next 60 years through the lens of a healthy and intentional art career.


Behind the Work with Jesse Woolston

Instability

Luke Shannon Avatar

Luke Shannon

This NFT is accompanied by a framed and signed 14.5” x 14.5” physical plotter print from the Artist. The winner of the auction may claim the physical at no additional cost.

I’ve always been interested in other artists’ first plots. They are the first introduction between two autonomous systems of art, and they are the starting conditions for the feedback system that becomes a body of work. They have the fewest preconceptions about what is possible, the fewest preferences for this or that output. They are entirely an experiment, and always surprising. 

In these first meetings, there is great opportunity to learn about the medium’s dispositions, and an artist’s inspirations. It was a pleasure in that moment to recognize Peter Saville’s impact on me, and to discover a new direction for my drawing. So, here are my first plots!

__Tell us about how your work created for “Notes From a Neutron Star” is connected to Peter Saville’s iconic cover for “Unknown Pleasures.”__

My-first-plot #0 is directly inspired by—almost copies—the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Actually, I think a lot of generative artists' first works are inspired by it. I was surprised when I was making my first plot and it so closely resembled the cover. It’s a contradictory piece for me in that it so quickly became a part of the collective consciousness despite expressing something really not seen before. I think it is remarkable that Peter Saville’s work was so open and so new that it continues to be imitated and remains receptive to that imitation. I think that is a wonderful quality of the work.

__How does this work reflect the direction that your artistic practice is going?__

I love this question. Especially (and somewhat ironically) in the context of this work, because this is the first plotter work I ever made! But it actually exemplifies how I think about this series—I think that these first works contain so much of my self and my practice precisely because they are my first works, because they are genuine experiments with very few assumptions or preconceptions about what is possible. In my practice, I am continually trying to inhabit the mind of a beginner, and unlearn the biases that I tend towards. I think a lot of learning can be figuring out what not to pay attention to, but I don’t want to privilege any one thing above another. One of the reasons I make generative art is because I believe it can be effective for confronting aspects of bias (because the work must be described explicitly at a low-level) and because it shows one idea/algorithm from dozens of different but equally valid angles/outputs.

__What role do music and other forms of media play in inspiring you throughout your creative process?__

More than anything, music has taught me how to approach generative art as performance. Live music and live performances exist specifically because of their audience–without the audience it is a rehearsal. Similarly, generative art is often only created, only exists at all, because of the act of the viewer or collector. In my opinion, these moments are in many ways a co-creation between artist and audience. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with coding and music to understand this better—making album covers, making music videos, live coding concert visuals, even live plotting at concerts.

__What has been the most rewarding aspect of your artistic career thus far?__

For me I think it has been the close and communal investigation of algorithms—trying to understand how a work was made, exploring and curating a series as a community, sharing ideas about algorithms with other artists. I find investigating nature and natural algorithms through generative imitation can be the most fruitful. The algorithms that artists work with are not computer abstractions, in my opinion they are fundamental processes that aspects all over the world follow. Peter Saville’s visualization of a pulsar is a testament to that. Thinking about these algorithms, learning from them, teaching workshops on them, to me that is a radical and wonderful way of engaging in the world.

__What’s next for you and your art? What are you excited about for the rest of the year?__

I’m continuing to push my process with creating physical algorithmic art. The plotter has been for me, like many other coders, the first way to bring algorithms into the physical world—but I’ve been expanding my practice and media for the last three years. My next two projects are generative wooden chairs and generative ceramic vases.


Type	Generative
Max supply	100

Receive Transmission

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Behind the Work with Aaron Penne