Harold Cohen (AARON)

Harold Cohen has accomplished so much in his lifetime. He is most famous for his program AARON, a Cybernetic Artist. It all started in London where he studied painting at the School of Fine Arts. Shortly after in 1968, Cohen started teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the School of Fine Arts in London. During Cohen's time in London, his work was widely displayed in many different areas. Many events were international shows. Cohen represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale, Documenta 3, Paris Biennale, and the Carnegie International. Most of his exhibit work is displayed regularly at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London.

In the late 1960s, Harold Cohen left London traveled to the United States, particularly San Diego, California. Cohen came to San Diego with a well established international reputation as an English painter. He was invited to the University of California San Diego as a visiting professorship. He took the offer so that he could because he was interested in computer programming and particularly in the field or artificial intelligence. After this offer, he never would return to London. A couple years later, Cohen was then invited as a Guest Scholar to spend two years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. During his time spent at Stanford University, Cohen studied the process he is most famous for to this day. His work consisted of "building a machine-based simulation of the cognitive processes underlying the human act of drawing." This then sparked the program that Cohen now calls AARON. It is a program that produces "freehand" drawings in museums and science centers in the United States, Europe, and Japan. A museum that we are all familiar that you would be able to see this program, AARON, would be at the Los Angeles County Museum. Many other museums that include Cohen's work would be the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the IBM Gallery in New York. There are also science centers that exhibit Cohen's work. Some including the Ontario Science Center and Pittsburgh's Buhl Center to name a couple. As you can see, Cohen is very well known internationally by the way his work is displayed across the world. Cohen now has his own permanent exhibit located in Boston at the Computer Museum and also represented the United States in the Japan World Fair in Tsukuba in 1985.

Not only is Harold Cohen an artist, he is also a very well known writer as well. Cohen has delivered invited papers at a number of different conferences. Some including the College Art Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence, and the Tokyo Nicograph Conference. Cohen has also produced a number of published writings. His first one being "What is an Image?" in 1979. Then came several more in the twenty years following.

Both pictures above display the plotting pen controlled by AARON. This intelligent machine, stated in the photo above, creates a hard copy of the artists original artwork. It took Harold Cohen nearly thirty years to perfect the program and to have the latest CyberArt advancements. But AARON is not just any ordinary sceensaver. The program was productized by Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies Inc. It is said that "AARON is the first fine art screensaver to utilize artificial intelligence to continuously create original paintings on your PC." Not only can AARON be considered a screensaver, it could even be a robot, the first robot in history to paint original art. Early efforts in creating AARON, can from Cohen studying a computer and how well it could produce a piece of artwork. At the time, the plotting pen from AARON could only produce what looked liked scribble, or something that could amount to a childrens' drawing. Over time, as Cohen had more time to develop his work, this kind of technology is able to mix its own paints, creates striking artwork and even washes its own brushes. AARON can make drawings about anything it knows about, but it actually knows very little. For example, people, trees, potted plants, and objects such as tables, boxes, and decorations because these figures are the most simple. AARON mainly controls itself, but with a little help from Cohen. "I don't tell it what to do. I tell it what it knows, and IT decides what to do." Early developments of AARON produced outlines of scribbles. Now AARON is able to construct a range of "core figures" to replace the scribble, and is smart enough to know that it shouldn't always draw the entire outline.

In a Question and Answer that Cohen participated in, he was asked the question "When you first began programming your robot and moving away from painting yourself, what was the reaction of other artists?" He answered by stating that he is unsure how other artists felt. He knew not everyone was going to like his work, but surprisingly got much feedback on how well he was doing. But then there is also the argument that AARON is not real artwork and it does not come from an artist that actually feels and owns the work he or she is creating. Another question I felt stood out to me was when Cohen was asked "The paintings we saw AARON created were all portraits of people. Does AARON also paint landscapes, animals, or other subjects?" Cohen responded by stating AARON will paint as much as it knows. Cohen often wonders if he should tell AARON more things so that it is able to produce more drawings. But came to the conclusion that it would not be any better for AARON to know how to do more, but simply do things it already knows better.

"I wrote it to discover what an independent (machine) intelligence might do, given some knowledge of the world and some rudimentary physical capabilities. And, in the process, to have IT teach ME about possibilities I hadn't imagined. I'd be happier if AARON's work in the future were LESS like human work, not MORE like human work."

Stated above is a quote from Harold Cohen describing what AARON is and what he would like it to do in the future. I feel as though this can be considered art but at the same time it could not be. The reason I feel it could not be considered art because you do not have physically have an artist actually sitting in front of a canvas, using a brush and paint to produce their artwork. Instead you have a robot painting a portrait that a human being designed it to do. On the other hand, I think that it can be considered art because an artist did create the robot program named AARON. I feel that artists are all about creating or designing something different when it comes to art, so how would this be any different. So I feel that it is art because it is something unique and different that no one has created before.