Harold Cohen (1928-2016) was a British artist trained in fine art, who rose to prominence in the United States for a rather surprising achievement: the creation of AARON, generally accepted as being the first artificial intelligence (AI) artmaking programme. To call AARON “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer, however, the software’s true nature is something more rudimentary than what we consider to be AI today. This distinction is important in understanding the fascinating body of generative art Cohen created with AARON, currently on show at the art exhibition AARON, presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition is on from February 3-May 19, 2024, and is co-organised by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, and David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant, both of the Whitney Museum. Paul joins STIR to shed light on AARON’s nature and explore the concept of authorship in relation to Cohen and the software’s collaboration.
Cohen worked from the early 1970s to the end of his life to develop AARON. He named the software after the Abrahamic figure Aaron, the brother of Moses who spoke on his behalf. AARON’s development alludes to how artmaking has been seen throughout history as a form of communication with the divine. However, Cohen did not take the analogy with the divine literally and instead saw the programme as a close collaborator, or as his “other self,” as he often referred to it.
The crucial distinction between AARON and current-generation AI is that the software did not possess the seemingly limitless ability AI now displays to improve itself through self-learning. This is not to say that AARON did not have any agency. As Paul explains, “[AARON] had a lot of autonomy and could also improve its craft within its parameters. While AARON could not expand its knowledge base beyond the parameters that Cohen had given it—for example, spaces, figures, plants and simple objects in the figurative phase of the software—it still had millions of options in its creation of compositions.” The art curator considers AARON to be an early form of “symbolic AI”, as it operated with its own internal feedback system, which responded to Cohen increasing or decreasing the agency of the artificial intelligence software.
While AARON could not expand its knowledge base beyond the parameters that Cohen had given it…it still had a lot of autonomy and millions of options in its creation of compositions.
– Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney exhibits the artistic output of multiple iterations of AARON, undertaken over decades and across a range of materialities. The exhibition begins with early works that were created on drawing machines, which Paul tells STIR, has sometimes been mistaken for AARON but was controlled by the software. Moving on, there are drawings and paintings that were composed by AARON and filled in by Cohen, as well as digital art from the early 2000s onwards, which were made to be experienced on screens.
Coming to the question of authorship of the works created by Cohen and AARON, the contemporary artist signed the pieces himself as the creator of AARON. However, as AARON has created new works at the Whitney, audiences are pressed to rethink the idea of ownership in the age of AI art. Paul forms a distinction here, telling STIR, “While the works plotted in the galleries are new creations by the AARON software, they are not new Harold Cohen works, even though Harold joked that he would have a posthumous exhibition of new work. The Harold Cohen Trust is clear that a new work by Harold Cohen / AARON required a triad of influences: Cohen, the AARON software and the process – the constant back and forth between them and the tweaking, the choice of output formats and so forth. This means the creation of new Harold Cohen / AARON works effectively ended in 2016.”
Paul ends her interview with STIR by reminding us that AARON’s rudimentary nature in relation to cutting-edge AI does not diminish Cohen’s accomplishment in the slightest. Cohen was a forerunner for what one sees all over the internet today. One must bear in mind that Cohen coded AARON from scratch, without any guarantee that such a programme was even possible. The fact that Cohen was already an established painter by the early 1970s before undertaking the development of AARON makes his achievement all the more laudable. Who can say what the state of AI would be today were it not for the contributions of pathbreaking creatives such as Harold Cohen?
AARON is being presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York from February 3 – May 19, 2024.