Artist Post: Harold Cohen

This artist was selected from the Paul Herz reading.

Harold Cohen (b. 1928) is an English-born painter and programmer. He graduated from the University of London with a Diploma in Fine Arts in 1951 and has since then gone on to teach in a variety of academic positions. He has also displayed his art in a huge number of exhibitions, written many essays, presented many lectures, and published 4 books.

Cohen is known for being the creator of AARON, a computer program capable of physically controlling a pen and creating line drawings. These drawings follow specific algorithms that mimic the cognitive aspects of drawing and can output either abstract art or representational art, including figures such as plants and people. AARON is not capable of self learning and all of the themes and figures, called 'styles,' are manually written by Cohen before being added into the code. He started working on AARON in 1973, while he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. In 1995 Cohen expanded on his software, enabling AARON to color the images that it had created. (Previously he would take generated line drawings and color/paint them manually.) AARON can now also create entirely digital images. To this date he is still modifying AARON's code and generating new images every year.

As of late (the past few years) Cohen/AARON's art has taken a distinctively abstract, floral turn. While the human figures in tropical/beach scenes are probably his most classic works, I find his new art to also be very interesting. The colors are pleasing to look at and although there are lines and squiggles going all over the place, there is a method to the madness that shines through. Cohen's work bridges the fields of art, computer programming, and cognitive science with creations (created by a creation) that are highly technical and symbolic, but can still be appreciated at the visual level.


Visit Harold Cohen's site here.