Harold Cohen (British, 1928-2016) was a painter who turned to building AARON, a computer program he wrote to generate drawings and paintings on its own.,,He developed AARON from the late 1960s at the University of California, San Diego, and kept refining it until his death, making it one of the longest-running AI art projects in history.,,
Cohen belonged to the same generation of British painters as David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Richard Smith, showing his abstract, biomorphic paintings across England from the early 1960s and later in London, New York and Toronto.He represented Great Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale, Documenta III, the Paris Biennale and the Carnegie International.By the late 1960s he had moved to UC San Diego as a visiting professor, where graduate student Jef Raskin introduced him to programming.,By 1971 he had built a painting system, presented at the Fall Joint Computer Conference.
He named the program AARON and, from 1973, used a robot called a turtle to put its drawings on paper.AARON's drawings, often hand-colored by Cohen, were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 and Tate Gallery in 1983, the year plotter drawings from its Arnolfini Series were exhibited at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol.,For the Buhl Science Center he enlarged and hand-colored AARON's forms into Socrates' Garden, an 18-by-23-foot acrylic mural shaped like a tree.At the 1985 World's Fair in Tsukuba, Japan, AARON drew live in the U.S. Pavilion, and Emperor Hirohito extended his official tour to ask questions.In 1995 Cohen unveiled a version that mixed its own paint and applied it with a robot arm, shown at Boston's Computer Museum as “The Robotic Artist: AARON in Living Color”.,
Cohen chaired UC San Diego's Visual Arts Department and directed its Centre for Research in Computing and the Arts from 1992, and kept developing AARON from his Encinitas, California studio after retiring.He received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art in 2014,and died on April 27, 2016, at 87, shortly after publishing Fingerpainting for the 21st Century on AARON's touchscreen process.His work entered the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Stedelijk Museum,and in 2024 the Whitney Museum devoted the retrospective “Harold Cohen: AARON” to his software, curated by Christiane Paul.The Harold Cohen Trust worked with Gazelli Art House and Verisart to mint AARON prints posthumously as blockchain-certified editions,and in 2025 M+ Hong Kong acquired Cohen and AARON's work.
