Harold Cohen
Born 1928-05-01 in London, United Kingdom.
Harold Cohen is a British artist who has lived in California since 1968. His major interest has always been color. However, for several decades he was almost exclusively concerned with the representation problem: How little effort in lines does it take to generate an image that people can easily recognize as representing something specific? In the early 1960s, Cohen had already been successful as a painter, before he came into close contact with the computer’s capabilities in 1968. After he had moved to San Diego, CA, USA, he soon met Edward Feigenbaum of Stanford University. Inspired by him, Cohen began investigating methods of Artificial Intelligence for applications in fine art. At the same time, he got a first introduction to programming (in Lisp) from Jeff Raskin. During the 1970s, he supervised the construction of computer-controlled drawing machines. Best known of these became a version of the Turtle, originally used at MIT by kids learning elementary geometry by writing programs in the programming language Logo. Cohen created his own alter ego as an artist in 1974, when his computer program AARON made its first appearance. Moving the turtle around on long paper rolled across the floor, Aaron generated drawings to fill the walls. This turned into a public spectacle at documenta VI in Kassel, Germany, in 1977. Cohen developed Aaron into an enormously powerful and complex rule-based system, which has taken over his artistic production ever since. In the 1990s, the drawing machine was finally replaced by a painting machine. It was capable of painting, in Cohen’s typical bright colors, half-portraits of women. In 2006, however, Cohen abandoned the painting machine. Since the huge rule-based system (probably the most successful so-called Expert System ever) had grown almost out of hands, Cohen decided to return to his original interest in color. He collapsed the color control part of Aaron’s rules into algorithms, and started freshly again.
(Adopted from Herzogenrath & Lähnemann 2009:22)
Web site: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~hcohen/
1946-1948 Radar engineer in the Royal Air Force.
1948-52 Student of Fine Art at the Slade School, University College, London. Diploma in Fine Art in 1951.
1952 Abbey Scholarship allows him to spend six months in Rome, Italy.
1952-1954 Lecturer in Art History at the Camberwell School of Art, London.
1956-59 Painter and lecturer at various colleges in Great Britain, including the University of Nottingham.
1960-61 Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund for a stay in New York.
1961-65 Instructor in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London
1965 Participates at documenta III in Kassel, Germany. Midcareer retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Tapestry commissioned by British Petroleum Company.
1965-1968 Visitor, Slade School of Fine Art; Departmental Visitor, Coventry College of Art.
1966 Represents England, together with four other artists, at the XXXIII Biennale di Venezia.
1968 Moves to San Diego, CA, USA. Visiting professor in fine art at the University of California, San Diego. First computer graphics.
1969 Full professor at University of California, San Diego. Head of the department of fine art until 1971.
1971 First appearance of »A Computer-Controlled Drawing Machine« at the Fall Joint Computer Conference.
1973-75 Visitor to the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University (California).
1974 First version of computer program AARON. A rule-based system that Cohen develops over many versions into one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful expert system of all times.
1977 Second invitation to documenta (VI) in Kassel, Germany. Cohen demonstrates the Turtle.
Late 1970s Aaron draws abstract images. Cohen is inspired by petroglyphs in Chantal Valley, Southern California.
1980s Aaron capable of drawing figurative images: Floral structures and humanoid figures.
From 1983 Aaron stimulates color decisions that Cohen adds to the automatic line drawings.
1994 Professor emeritus.
Although Harold Cohen is one of the first artists to consistently and incessantly explore the computer and to programme it himself, he did not participate in any of the important early computer art exhibitions. Despite his emphasis on algorithmic art with an important random component, Aaron’s works do not represent a break in Cohen’s artistic oeuvre.
(Adopted from Herzogenrath & Nierhoff-Wielk 2007:322)
Artwork (10 of 36)
Artworks owned
Exhibitions participated
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Last change by susi on 8th of December 2009