Jack Weber meets Harold Cohen, the acclaimed artist who gave it all up for computer programming and his mechanical artist, Aaron
In 1968 Harold Cohen was an internationally acclaimed artist, wid
Jack Weber meets Harold Cohen, the acclaimed artist who gave it all up for computer programming and his mechanical artist, Aaron
In 1968 Harold Cohen was an internationally acclaimed artist, widely recognised as one of the great British painters of his generation. Just as he was at the height of his fame, he walked out on the traditional art world, abandoned the hedonistic pleasures of swinging 60s London, and moved to a quiet town in southern California. There, he taught himself computer programming and went on to devote almost the next 30 years of his life to developing just one complex program.
That program is called Aaron and it is arguably the most significant achievement to have emerged from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Significant, not simply because it works, but because it seeks to capture a human skill thats apparently so irrational, so un-mathematical that it would seem to defy any attempt at computerisation. A skill that, if it were mastered by a machine, would surely validate AI. That skill is art, and Aaron is an artist. It draws, it paints, it exhibits in major galleries and its work is sold for sums of money that many human artists arent at all familiar with.
Id been fascinated by this computerised artist, and its human creator, ever since the late 1970s when I first read about an exhibition of Aarons drawings. It wasnt simply the question of how Aaron worked that puzzled me - though that was intriguing enough - but the more complex question of Harold Cohens relationship with his silicon offspring. What made such an eminent artist decide to build a rival - or, at least, a surrogate to himself? How too, do the disparate worlds of fine art and computer coding coexist in this one person? And then there are the bigger questions: What, if anything, does Aaron teach us about art, perception, the potential of computing and the world of the imagination?