Harold Cohen: AARON

Feb 3–May 19, 2024

A person near a small table with flowers and a red background created out of lines without curves.
A person near a small table with flowers and a red background created out of lines without curves.

Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT, 2001. Screenshot. Artificial intelligence software. Dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2023.20. © Harold Cohen Trust

This exhibition traces the evolution of Harold Cohen’s AARON, the earliest artificial intelligence (AI) program for artmaking. Leaving behind his practice as an established painter in London, Cohen (1928–2016) conceived the software in the late 1960s at the University of California, San Diego, and named it AARON in the early 1970s. The title alludes to the biblical figure anointed as speaker for his brother Moses, and questions how artistic creation is often glorified as a form of communication with the divine. Cohen understood his work with AARON to be a collaboration, and he devoted his life to exploring the potential of artificial intelligence to translate an artist’s knowledge and process into code.

Over the decades the AARON software has created images meant to be executed by drawing and painting devices, as well as visuals for display on monitors or as projections. To generate AARON’s output, Cohen built his own plotters and painting machines, which interpret commands from a computer to make line drawings on paper with automated pens and add color with brushes. Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, this exhibition not only features AARON works, but also highlights the software as the central creative force behind them through screen-based versions of the program and drawings made by plotters operating live in the gallery.

As artificial intelligence tools for image creation have entered the mainstream with text prompt–driven software such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, Harold Cohen: AARON provides important historical perspective. It also offers deeper explorations of ideas about creativity, authorship, and collaboration in the context of AI.

This exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.

Generous support for Harold Cohen: AARON is provided by Judy Hart Angelo.

Significant support is provided by Joan and Irwin Jacobs.

Additional support is provided by the Bell Family Foundation and David L. Diamond.

En español

Esta exposición traza la evolución de AARON de Harold Cohen, el primer programa de inteligencia artificial (IA) para la creación de arte. Dejando atrás su práctica como pintor consagrado en Londres, Cohen (1928–2016), concibió el software a finales de la década de 1960 en la Universidad de California, San Diego, y lo nombró AARON al inicio de los setenta. El título alude a la figura bíblica proclamada como portavoz y mediadora de su hermano Moisés, y cuestiona cómo a menudo se glorifica la creación artística como forma de comunicación con lo divino. Cohen concibió su obra con AARON como una colaboración y dedicó su vida a explorar el potencial de la inteligencia artificial para traducir el conocimiento de un artista y codificarlo. 

A lo largo de décadas, el software AARON ha creado imágenes destinadas a ser ejecutadas por dispositivos de dibujo y de pintura, al igual que visuales para mostrar en monitores o a manera de proyecciones. Para generar producciones de AARON, Cohen construyó delineadores y máquinas pictóricas, que interpretan comandos de una computadora para hacer dibujos lineales sobre papel con bolígrafos automáticos y añade colores con pinceles. Tomados de la colección del Whitney, esta exhibición no sólo muestra obras de AARON, sino que también resalta el software como fuerza creativa central detrás de las mismas, a través de versiones del programa basadas en pantallas y dibujos hechos por plóteres que operan en vivo en la galería. 

Dado que las herramientas de inteligencia artificial para la creación de imágenes se han vuelto populares con softwares basados en mensajes de texto como DALL-E, Midjourney y Stable Difusion, Harold Cohen: AARON provee una perspectiva histórica importante. También ofrece una exploración más profunda sobre ideas de creatividad, autoría y colaboración en el contexto de la inteligencia artificial.

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AARON’s Beginnings 

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After conceiving AARON at the University of California, San Diego, in the late 1960s, Harold Cohen took the program to new levels at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab from 1973 to 1975. From the start, AARON was intended to be a program about artmaking and the nature of representation itself; it functions as a symbol manipulator. AARON combines formal rules—such as starting in the foreground of a drawing and moving to the background—with random events to generate elements like curved lines, straight lines, or closed figures. These emerging shapes are advanced further based on feedback inside the system that evaluates the “success” of a composition. Cohen seeded AARON’s code with understanding of external objects in the world (such as their size, shape, and position), which remains accessible in its long-term memory as needed. He also encoded knowledge about the internal, procedural paradigm of an artist’s drawing strategies. When creating a drawing, AARON thus would strive to satisfy certain criteria: distributing small and large items—some close together, others farther apart—with more or less detail to achieve a sense of dimension.

AARON evolved in several phases. It began with simple, evocative shapes that grew more complex to achieve a rudimentary sense of perspective. Cohen was inspired by the drawing process of children, who start by simply linking shapes and squiggles and move on to outlining connected forms. He also was influenced by a 1973 visit to the petroglyphs of Chalfant Valley, California, which he saw as demonstrating how a system of marks begins to function as an image.

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Active plotters

Two robotic drawing machines sketching on paper atop tables in a room with wooden flooring.
Two robotic drawing machines sketching on paper atop tables in a room with wooden flooring.

Installation view of Harold Cohen: AARON (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 3–May 19, 2024). From left to right: Active plotters drawing images from different periods of the AARON software. Plotter fabricated by Bantam Tools; courtesy Bre Pettis. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

The plotters are modernized re-creations of Harold Cohen’s early drawing machines. Constructed specifically for this exhibition, they draw images from different periods of the AARON software. The paper sizes and line widths of the plotter pens are consistent with those originally used by Cohen. Selected drawings produced during the run of the exhibition will be regularly mounted on the walls. 

The abstract drawings represent the earliest phase of Cohen’s work on his artmaking software and were first shown in 1972 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The code has been reconstructed from Cohen’s notebooks and recoded in the more recent Python language. The work titled Mazes is produced by Cohen’s “ freehand line algorithm” and generates colored lines that partition the space of the paper without ever enclosing any part of it. 

These early abstract visuals contrast with drawings from AARON’s figurative phase (starting roughly in the mid-1980s) that Cohen plotted in black and white. The images are produced by the KCAT AARON software, which is on view in the adjacent gallery as a projection.

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A person near a small table with flowers and a red background created out of lines without curves.
A person near a small table with flowers and a red background created out of lines without curves.

Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT, 2001. Screenshot. Artificial intelligence software. Dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2023.20. © Harold Cohen Trust

Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from the exhibition.

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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