The AARON Retrospective: Harold Cohen

“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.