Aaron Penne

Artist

Aaron Penne · site ↗

Based

1988, Seattle, Washington, USA

Raster

raster.art/artist/aaron-penne ↗

In the set

Apparitions · 1,500 editions / Rituals - Venice · 1,000 editions / Return · 300 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Aaron Penne (b. 1988) is an artist and engineer working with systems in Seattle, Washington. He holds a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and spent years in data engineering at Amazon Web Services before turning fully to generative art in 2018.¹ In 2021 he was named one of the top fifty artists in the NFT space globally, and by 2022 he had become Director of Engineering at Art Blocks, the platform that minted his breakthrough projects.²

Penne's practice sits at the intersection of rigorous engineering and aesthetic intuition. He writes code in p5.js, Python, and vanilla Javascript, building algorithms that generate visual outputs he describes as simultaneously computer-generated and hand-crafted.³ His work is collected by the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the Seattle NFT Museum, and has been shown at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Seattle Art Museum, and galleries in Lisbon, Berlin, London, New York City, and Los Angeles.⁴

Apparitions: 1,500 windows into the algorithmic organic

Released in March 2021 as part of Art Blocks Curated Series 2, Apparitions is Penne's most expansive long-form generative project: 1,500 unique works that explore what he calls the space between algorithmic and organic.⁵ The series takes its initial inspiration from a Levi Walter Yaggy visualization published in 1893, whose colorful layering and cloud-type markings Penne sought to replicate and transform into flowing, fabric-like forms.⁶

The algorithm behind Apparitions draws multiple straight lines across the screen and perturbs them according to an underlying noise field. Each line comprises hundreds of connected points offset by various rules, creating outputs that range from rigid mountains to floating sheets.⁷ Penne tuned eighteen parameters driving fourteen features, affecting visual style, positioning, and color palettes. Some features are discrete categories, others continuous ranges, and their interplay produces what Penne terms emergent and hidden characteristics: watercolor strips, sneak reaches, background fades, and even accidental bugs that become beloved traits.⁸

Series outputs · live on Art Blocks ↗

The color system in Apparitions is particularly intricate. Penne curated a palette of roughly thirty colors drawn from personal photographs, vintage data visualizations, Wada Sanzo palettes, and personal favorites.⁹ Special chance-based pickers, named The Oracle, Three Fates, and Zephyr, create vast sub-universes of color combinations. A Basil Gogos palette, rendered in HSB rather than RGB mode, produces surprising green intermediates between purple and white, giving certain outputs a monster-illustration intensity.¹⁰

Rituals - Venice: generative music meets generative image

In September 2021, Penne collaborated with musician Boreta (of The Glitch Mob) and the gallery Bright Moments to release Rituals - Venice, a collection of 1,000 audiovisual works that combine generative music and generative artwork into a singular parametric universe.¹¹ The first 200 editions were minted in real life at Bright Moments' Venice Beach gallery over two days, from sunset Friday to sunset Sunday, establishing what would become a signature format for the DAO: the IRL minting event.¹²

Left: Rituals - Venice · Right: Return · live on Art Blocks ↗

The music and visuals in Rituals - Venice are crafted to evolve infinitely. If left running, a single ritual will continue generating music and art without repeating for approximately nine million years, the artists claim.¹³ The collaboration is deeply iterative: Boreta works with the current state of the artwork on screen next to his music controls, while Penne codes with the current state of the music playing in his headphones.¹⁴ In 2022 the project won the inaugural Lumen Prize NFT Award for Art and Technology, a watershed moment for blockchain-based generative art.¹⁵

Return: the inward meditation

Return, released in June 2021 on Art Blocks Playground, comprises 300 works described by Penne as a meditation on returning inward.¹⁶ Where Apparitions explodes outward into chromatic complexity, Return contracts into quieter, more contemplative forms. The project demonstrates Penne's range within a single visual vocabulary: the same hand that orchestrates 1,500 exuberant apparitions can also choreograph 300 restrained returns.

Engineering the future of generative art

As Director of Engineering at Art Blocks, Penne does not merely produce artworks; he builds the infrastructure through which others create.¹⁷ He has served on the platform's curation board, evaluating projects for the Curated collection alongside figures such as Anika Meier.¹⁸ He founded the Generative Artists Club in 2018, a community that now numbers over four hundred members and has become a vital node for friendship, technical exchange, and mental health support among practitioners worldwide.¹⁹

Penne's influence extends into art-historical preservation. In 2023 he collaborated with the Foundation Herbert W. Franke and curator Anika Meier to translate Franke's 1982 code for ZENTRUM, originally written in AppleSoft Basic for the Apple II, into contemporary software for an NFT release.²⁰ Penne studied multiple Apple II emulators and spent a week with his father-in-law's Apple IIe machine in Phoenix to faithfully recreate the visual artifacts of the original.²¹

His works have appeared at Sotheby's and Christie's, including the Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale in June 2021 where Apparitions was featured alongside projects by Dmitri Cherniak, Tyler Hobbs, and Snowfro.²² In 2024 his Catalina diptych (dye sublimation prints on aluminium, each 80 x 120 cm) was offered at the Lumen Prize Anniversary auction at Sotheby's, having first been shown at Art Dubai through Galloire.²³

Bibliography

For the complete bibliography see the Aaron Penne links page ↗.