HAROLD COHEN
(1928 ― 2016)
Harold Cohen (1928-2016) was a British artist whose innovations at the forefront of technology changed the face of computer art. Working at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence since the late 1960s, Harold Cohen was the creator of AARON, one of the earliest AI computer programs designed to produce paintings and drawings autonomously. His work was exhibited extensively throughout his life at major institutions including Tate London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, LACMA and SFMOMA.
Having graduated from Slade School of Fine Art, Cohen’s first solo exhibition was held at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 1951 and by the mid-1960s he was recognized as one of Britain’s best regarded painters. In 1966, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. Two years later at the height of his career as a painter, he decided to relocate to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the University of California in San Diego. He learned the programming language FORTRAN and in 1971 was invited to spend two years at the Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he developed his ideas about machine-generated art which would eventually lead to the development of AARON, the AA drawing program that he continued to work on for the rest of his life.
The first major exhibition of his early work with computer-generated art was at LACMA in 1972 and throughout that decade his work was exhibited at Documenta 6 in Kassel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He continued his work at UC San Diego as professor, Chairman of the Visual Arts Department and eventually in 1992, Director of the Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts.
Following his retirement in 1994 from the university, he continued to work on AARON and produce new artwork in his studio in Encinitas, California. In 2014, Cohen received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Harold Cohen regarded artificial intelligence as a tool to better understand his own ways of perception and meaning and his work with algorithms and plotters inspired multiple generations of artists who use code in their practice.