Artist Post 3: Harold Cohen

Harold Cohen (web site)

Harold Cohen was born on May 1, 1928 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London where he lived, earning his diploma in 1951. He studied painting there and later became a teacher at the school as well. In 1971, when he moved to San Diegeo, he got into computer programming and artificial intelligence. This led to his involvement in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as a Guest Scholar at Stanford University according to a web site.

(web site)

"Coming Home" (web site)

(web site)

"Gauguin Beach" (web site)

Harold Cohen is the creator of a program called AARON, which is a computer program "designed to produce art autonomously" (web site) with which he creates his works as a retired artist in California today. "AARON developed from a fascination with the process of line-making and how enclosed forms, or shapes, were drawn on paper; initially Cohen did not approach his programming as an artistic activity, but rather a disciplined research into the grammar of conceptual space. He initially saw AARON as a program that emulated what humans did; then as an autonomous entity" (web site).

How AARON works is that Cohen encodes the basic structures for the images into the program and uses its "knowledge" of relative sizes (of body parts for instance) to create the image. This is interesting in that each time the program is used, even with the same structures encoded, the art can come out completely different than before.

Cohen's work stands out to me first and foremost because if the striking colors and energetic mood that his pieces emit. I love the bright colors and the creative forms that reveal themselves to be recognizable objects.

I do not completely understand, however, the process by which these works are created. The information I have found about the AARON program was a little abstract and I would liked to have been able to find out some more a bout how the art is created. Nevertheless, the finished product is very pleasing to the eye and I like it quite a lot. I do not see much political, racial, ethnic, environmental, etc, importance in his works, which is also interesting to me. I just see a celebration of colors and energy. Pretty cool stuff!