Harold Cohen

Author of the celebrated AARON program, an ongoing research effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence, Cohen is recognized as one of the few artists ever to have become deeply involved in artificial intelligence.

Cohen was an English painter with an established international reputation when he went to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1968 for a one-year Visiting Professorship. His first experience with computing followed almost immediately, and he never returned to London. He has served as director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA).

The AARON program began when Cohen was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1973. Together, he and AARON exhibited at London's Tate Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, and many more of the world's major art spaces. They were also shown at a dozen science centers, including the Ontario Science Center, the Boston Science Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry.

Cohen represented the US in the World Fair in Tsukuba, Japan, in 1985. He has had a permanent exhibit devoted to his work in Boston's Computer Museum. He has given invited papers on his work at major international conferences on AI, computer graphics, and art technologies.

His work is widely cited in the literature, and it is the subject of Pamela McCorduck's AARON's CODE: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen (Freeman). In more than two decades, AARON produced many thousands of drawings, to a few dozen of which Cohen added color. The goal of his research at that time—by far the most difficult to date, he said—was to have AARON do its own coloring, and this phase of the project was well under way. The painting machine with which AARON colored real drawings in the real world was premiered at an exhibit at the Computer Museum in Boston in the spring of 1995.