A change in direction
One day, the Head of the Art Department at UCSD was looking at some of his prints and said, You should really meet this guy, Jeff Raskin he does computing and I think you might be interested in workin
One day, the Head of the Art Department at UCSD was looking at some of his prints and said, You should really meet this guy, Jeff Raskin he does computing and I think you might be interested in working with each other. Raskin (who later went on to develop the desktop interface for the Macintosh) offered to teach Cohen programming: He said, When do you want to start? and I said, Tomorrow morning. And that was really the beginning of the whole thing.
Raskins idea of how to teach programming to an artist was hardly conventional. For five weeks, he made him do flowcharts, then handed over a FORTRAN manual and told him to get on with it. Cohen sat up all night reading that book and forcing himself to understand. I started to feel like I was using my brain for the first time in a long time. Gradually it all began to make sense, By the time I was able to put a program together, I simply found it stimulating - psychedelic in the genuine sense of brain expanding. I didnt think for a long time that it had anything to do with art. After some six months, though, he began to wonder if computing might help to answer some of the questions that had been troubling him as an artist. Questions such as: What is an image exactly? Why can we look at marks on a flat surface and believe that they refer to something that exists in the real world? He began to dream of a robot artist.
His one-year visit to San Diego soon stretched into something more permanent. He joined the faculty of the Art Department as a full-time professor, and southern California became his home. I met my second wife and my first computer and there didnt really seem to be much point in going back. Frustrated by the puny punched-card machine that was the universitys only computer, he managed to get a Data General Nova with 8K of memory. On this he created some of his first computer-generated drawings - fairly basic arrangements of lines that explored ways of partitioning space.
Cohen began painting again and became increasingly pre-occupied with trying to probe the essence of art: What actually happens when people draw? What are the mechanisms involved? What is it that makes a freehand drawing look as if its a freehand drawing? He developed an idea of what he called cognitive primitives, the fundamental building blocks of visual significance. The very earliest things I did were based on that notion - the difference between closed forms and open forms and so on. Held back by the limitations of his computer, he experimented with making rule-based paintings himself - crumpling a piece of sailcloth and then following the creases with a pen according to certain rules. The aim was to explore different algorithms for generating complex shapes, but all it proved was that computers are less easily distracted than people when it comes to following rules.
This article appeared in the April, 2000 issue of PC Authority.
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