Aaron Penne (b. 1988) is an artist and engineer based in Seattle, Washington, who makes generative artwork with code.He founded the Generative Artists Club in 2018 and serves as Director of Engineering at Art Blocks.,His work explores the boundary between algorithmic and organic form, often blending code with sound in collaboration with the musician Boreta.,
In 2019 Penne began developing the algorithm behind Apparitions, an Art Blocks collection of 1,500 generative works inspired by an 1893 cloud-classification chart by Levi Walter Yaggy and by the cliff sides of Southern California, where he once lived. The piece runs on 18 parameters governing 14 visual features, and its colors were partly drawn from photographs of a friend's wedding and from vintage data visualizations.His 2022 project Within/Without traces a lineage from Sol LeWitt's instruction-based Wall Drawings through Larva Labs's Autoglyphs, using freshly generated Autoglyph-style instructions to drive code that renders colorful, slowly shifting abstract forms.He closed its minting early after the secondary market price fell below the mint price, leaving the edition smaller than originally planned.
With the musician Boreta, Penne created Rituals - Venice, an audiovisual generative work minted live at a Bright Moments event in Venice, California, in September 2021. The project won the inaugural Lumen Prize for Art and Technology NFT Award in 2022.In 2023 the pair released Passages, a second collaboration built around a sunrise-to-sunset live minting experience that paired generative visuals with a sound bath and custom incense.
Penne curated the Feral File group exhibition “N=12” in 2023.His work is held in the collection of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and has been shown at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore and the Seattle Art Museum.
