This exhibition at the Whitney Museum traces the evolution of Harold Cohen’s AARON, the first artificial intelligence (AI) program for artistic creation.
Abandoning his practice as a painter based in London, Cohen (1928-2016) designed the software in the late 1960s at the University of California, San Diego, and named it AARON in the early 1970s. alludes to the biblical character anointed to speak to his brother Moses, and questions the way artistic creation is often glorified as a form of communication with the divine. Cohen understood that his work with AARON was a collaboration, and he dedicated his life to exploring the potential of artificial intelligence to translate an artist’s knowledge and process into code.
Is Artificial Intelligence AARON an artist?
Over the decades, AARON software has created images intended to be executed by drawing and painting devices, as well as images intended to be displayed on screens or projected. To generate AARON’s results, Cohen built his own plotters and painting machines, which interpret commands from a computer to make line drawings on paper using automated pens and add color to the using brushes. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, this exhibition not only showcases AARON’s work, but also highlights software as a central creative force, through on-screen versions of the program and drawings made by plotters running live in the gallery.
As artificial intelligence tools for image creation have become commonplace with text-driven software such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, Harold Cohen: AARON offers an important historical perspective. It also offers deeper explorations of ideas about creativity, authorship, and collaboration in the context of AI.
2024-02-10 13:42:29
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