Untitled (i23-3505) belongs to Harold Cohen’s seminal Maze series, produced between 1971 and
1972 using his First Generation Drawing Machine and a custom-written programme known as
the original Maze Code. The work exemplifies one of the three distinct strategies for partitioning
pictorial space, as explored in Cohen’s groundbreaking exhibition Three Behaviours for the Partitioning
of Space, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972, and later in Machine Generated
Images at the La Jolla Museum, San Diego (1973).

The Maze works use an algorithmically generated line, or what Cohen referred to in early texts
as the ‘freehand line generator’/’wandering line’, and later known as the ‘freehand line algorithm’.
While visually the line may appear to wander or wiggle, the construction of the composition was
deeply intentional, in an effort to convey the presence of an intelligent, decision making force
through a line that resists mechanical rigidity and character. The partitioning of the space on
the picture plane was done in such a way as to never enclose any part of it, so that every part of
the field may be reached from any other part without crossing a line. This constraint programmed
into the system, creates compositions that are complex and suggestive of organic growth or
cognitive mapping.

Used by Cohen throughout the following four decades, this algorithm was foundational in the
development of AARON.