Harold Cohen - Digital media artist


                                                              Harold Cohen (1928-2016)
Harold Cohen was a British born artist who was known as the creator of AARON, a computer programme designed to produce art autonomously. His work at the intersection of computer artificial intelligence and art attracted a great deal of attention, leading to exhibitions at many museums including the Tate Gallery.

An early drawing by AARON, 1971

 
He began work on AARON in 1968 at the University of California where he worked for almost 30 years. (He was a painter with a well established career in his own right before then). He asked the question whether machines could be used to serve artistic intentions. By 1971 he had taught himself how to programme a computer and he exhibited computer generated art at a conference. The following year he exhibited a drawing machine. He was a skilled engineer and he built many devices e.g. a robotic turtle that roamed and drew on huge sheets of paper, a painting robot that mixed its own colours etc. For AARON, Cohen studied how children drew and he discovered the characteristics of images which made them mean something. AARON went through a representational stage in which images were recognisably of people or plants, however Cohen and AARON returned to abstraction and to images that almost looked like something. 

                                  A picture during the representational stage - clearly legs!

 He initially wrote AARON in one programme but found it too inflexible and too inexpressive to deal with the complexities of colour. He tried to teach the machine to use colours in the mid 80’s – this was a very challenging process (before he put in the colours by hand).

 
A painting done during the abstract stage - these are the ones I really like -I like flowers which is what I take them to be and I love the choice of colours -all very strong.

Cohen changed the way people understood the interaction between art and technology.

While being intrigued by many of the artworks and loving a lot of the colour, this art method leaves me with more questions than answers. If the computer is working autonomously, it is surely making the decisions about where to put what colour, draw what shape etc, and Cohen is only the person who programmed the computer. So the artist is surely AARON and not Cohen? And what thought can a computer put into a painting to make it mean something beyond what it looks like at surface value? I don’t pretend to understand much of this!

                                                  Cohen finger painting with AARON.

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