About the Event
“Many of the things we see computer programs doing today would have been regarded as impossible a couple of decades ago; AARON is surely one of them.”
— Harold Cohen, 1999
Moving through the 1970s until the artist’s passing in 2016, displayed works will elucidate the ways in which Cohen both noticed and navigated evolving spaces of artistic possibility through the world’s first example of Meta-Art. The retrospective celebrates Cohen’s appreciation of abstract sensibility, mathematical discipline, and creativity as arising once “the individual starts to question the unquestioned assumptions of his field.”
Now, AI technology is almost inseparable from our everyday lives, subconsciously driving many of our actions with once unthinkable sophistication. AI’s understanding of human complexity has been a vast project, with the early work of Cohen and his peers playing a crucial role in its evolution. Thus, The AARON Retrospective serves as a lens through which to recognise how artists of Cohen’s era laid the necessary foundations for our contemporary AI landscape.
About the Artist
Harold Cohen (1928 – 2016) was a British-born artist who famously created AARON, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously. His artistic practice developed at the intersection of artificial intelligence and abstraction and significantly contributed to the evolution of computer art. Cohen’s work attracted attention worldwide, leading to exhibitions at major institutions including Tate London, SFMOMA and many more
Having graduated from Slade School of Fine Art, he had his first solo show at Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1951 and a solo exhibition in Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1965. Internationally, Cohen represented the UK at the Venice Biennale, Documenta III, the Paris Biennale and the Carnegie International. Contemporary exhibiting venues also included The Los Angeles County Museum, La Jolla Museum, and The Art Department Gallery, UC Berkeley.
Cohen moved to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, in 1968. He stayed at UC San Diego as a professor for nearly three decades, part of the time as chairman of the Visual Arts Department. He was appointed Director of the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego in 1992.
On retiring from UC, Cohen continued to work on AARON, producing new artwork in his studio in Encinitas, California. He then shifted away from drawing and painting machines, working on an automated vertical spraying machine, before rapidly changing the direction of his engineering. In 2014, Cohen received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.
