Harold Cohen: ‘Once upon a time there was an entity named Aaron’
Harold Cohen (1928 – 2016) explored AI and art for nearly 50 years before we saw the rising popularity of these new machine learning tools. In those five decades, Cohen worked on a single program called Aaron that involved teaching a robot to create drawings. Aaron’s education took a similar path to that of humans, evolving from simple pictographic shapes and symbols to more figurative imagery, and finally into full-colour images. We had the great pleasure to include Cohen’s work from a series which had been done for an exhibition in 1983 at the Arnolfini in Bristol in our previous Automat und Mensch show.
Harold Cohen was a painter, printmaker and designer of textiles, but he is perhaps best known as the creator of AARON, as mentioned above, a computer program which uses artificial intelligence (the branch of computer science concerned with making computers behave like humans) to generate artworks.
Harold Cohen
Arnolfini Series, 1983
Plotterzeichnung, Tinte auf Papier
60 x 80 cm
Cohen trained as a painter and represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale. In 1968 he became a visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego, where he was introduced to computer programming. In 1971 Cohen took up a post as visiting scholar in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. While at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, he began developing the computer program called Aaron, in which he sought to codify the act of drawing.
AARON was conceived (around 1973) as the first in a projected series of programs but in fact Cohen kept still working with AARON until his last years. His creation of this program grew out of what he has described as his need 'to understand what art is'. In the process of designing a program to work with random variables, making its own decisions on colouring and composition, he explored the potential inherent in different programming languages. In its early years Aaron could only produce monochrome line drawings which were hand-coloured by Cohen. He had then modified the program so that it chose and applied the colours itself, resulting in digital prints which are the unmediated work of AARON. By the 1980s the program could produce some real-world shapes, including foliage and human figures. (source: V&A Museum)
Drawing, computer-generated, with hand colouring, by Harold Cohen, 1974.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Drawing, computer-generated, with hand colouring, by Harold Cohen, 1977-1982.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
It’s fascinating to read what the artist himself was saying about AARON, as stated in his publication from 1982 ‘ HOW TO MAKE A DRAWING.’ :
‘Aaron was clearly not a tool in an orthodox sense. It was closer to being a sort of assistant, if the need for an human analogue persists, but not an assistant which could learn what I wanted done by looking at what I did myself, the way any of Rubens' assistants could see perfectly well for themselves what a Rubens painting was supposed to look like. This was not an assistant which could perform any better for having done a thousand drawings, not an assistant which could bring anything approximating to a human cognitive system to bear on the production of drawings intended for human use. A computer program is not a human being. But it IS the case, presumably, that any entity capable of adapting its performance to circumstances which were unpredictable when its performance began exhibits intelligence: whether that entity is human or not. We are living on the crest of a cultural shock-wave of unprecedented proportions, which thrusts a new kind of entity into our world: something less than human, perhaps, but potentially capable of many of the higher intellectual functions — it is too early still to guess HOW many — we have supposed to be uniquely human. We are in the process of coming to terms with the fact that "intelligence" no longer means, uniquely, "human intelligence." ‘
Harold Cohen, Professor Emeritus, creator of AARON, University of California, San Diego
Harold Cohen was of great inspiration to many contemporary AI artists such as Tom White; White’s artwork investigates the Algorithmic Gaze: how machines see, know, and articulate the world. As machine perception becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, the world as seen by computers becomes our dominant reality. White explores this phenomenon in his work.
Collaborating with AI systems, White creates physical abstract prints that are reliably classified by neural networks. It’s art by AI, for AI. By giving the algorithms a voice to speak in, we are better able to see the world through the eyes of a machine.
Tom White is a New Zealand based artist investigating artificial intelligence and machine perception. He is also a lecturer teaching computational design and creative AI at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design.
We were glad to had also Tom White work featured in the Automat und Mensch exhibition here at Kate Vass Galerie in Zürich last year.
