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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The Figurative Phase 

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This section of the exhibition contains works representing a phase of AARON’s creations focused on figures, often in combination with plants or flowers. At its center is the projection of the AARON KCAT (Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies) software, which Cohen produced and released with computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil in 2001. KCAT became a signature iteration of AARON’s output and reflected Cohen’s efforts to make original art available to a greater number of people at a low price, as he released it in a screen-saver version.

AARON’s method of creating images differs fundamentally from that of currently popular AI software such as DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, which use algorithms trained to make associations between images and text descriptions and generate their output from existing images on the basis of a user’s text prompts. AARON is a procedural system: it mimics human decision-making by processing its bodies of knowledge through instructions for completing tasks and if-then rules.

Cohen sought to always program the cognitive processes of a painter into his algorithms, imitating the work of understanding the relationship between line and form in representation as an abstract painter would. Cohen’s unique code creates legible figures and objects in infinite combinations with a spatial knowledge of the third dimension.

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Harold Cohen, Susan with Plant, 1991

Illustration of a person in blue standing behind oversized pink flowers in a red pot, with a textured grey background.
Illustration of a person in blue standing behind oversized pink flowers in a red pot, with a textured grey background.

Harold Cohen, Susan with Plant, 1991. Acrylic and plotter pen on canvas, 85 × 61 in. (215.9 × 154.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Robert and Deborah Hendel 2023.146. © Harold Cohen Trust

Susan with Plant exemplifies how the complex rules in Harold Cohen’s AARON software work together to generate a legible image with abstract elements and fine details. The plotter painting represents a stage in AARON’s evolution, from approximately 1989 onward, in which the composition uses a fully three-dimensional knowledge base. The plotted lines and acrylic color delineate and block areas of the canvas surface to create an environment, with objects placed in the foreground and a figure in the middle ground in front of a textured wall in the background. Figurative works like Susan with Plant demonstrate AARON’s understanding of spatial and anatomical structure, as well as human posture and variations of skin color. The positioning of the eyes, nose, and mouth is not symmetrical but arranged at axes—indicating Cohen’s unique rules for painterly representation. Cohen saw AARON’s figurative works as an abstract form of self-portraiture, an attempt to codify how he, and viewers, understand images.

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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

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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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