Receive Transmission by 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.