Harold Cohen (1 May 1928 – 27 April 2016) was a British-born artist who was noted as the creator of

AARON According to the Old Testament of the Bible, Aaron ( or ) was an Israelite prophet, a high priest, and the elder brother of Moses. Information about Aaron comes exclusively from religious texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament ...

, a computer program designed to produce paintings and drawings autonomously, which set it apart from previous programs. His work in the intersection of

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and painting led to exhibitions at many museums, including the Tate Gallery in London.

Early life

Cohen was born in London, the son of Polish- Russian Jewish parents, and was educated there at the

Slade School of Fine Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

Career

Cohen represented

Great Britain Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the north-west coast of continental Europe, consisting of the countries England, Scotland, and Wales. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the List of European ...

at the

Venice Biennial The Venice Biennale ( ; ) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy. There are two main components of the festival, known as the Art Biennale () and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Architecture Biennale (), ...

in 1966. Cohen moved to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

in 1968. He was later given the rank of professor and stayed at UC San Diego for nearly three decades; part of the time as chairman of the Visual Arts Department. In addition, he served as director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego from 1992 to 1998. Cohen taught at UC San Diego from 1968 to 1994. After his retirement from UCSD, he continued to work on

and produce new artwork in his studio in Encinitas, California. In 2014, Cohen received the

ACM SIGGRAPH ACM SIGGRAPH is the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques based in New York. It was founded in 1969 by Andy van Dam (its direct predecessor, ACM SICGRAPH was ...

Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement award. Early in 2016, Cohen started a new project with AARON called ''Fingerpainting for the 21st Century''. In this project, Cohen used a touch screen to digitally colour and finish artworks. In previous AARON projects, images would be outputted in physical form before Cohen made alterations.

Family life

His partner was the prominent Japanese poet Hiromi Itō.

AARON

Cohen's work on AARON began in 1968 at the University of California, San Diego. He initially wrote AARON in

the C programming language ''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the C programming langu ...

but eventually converted to

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

, citing that C was "too inflexible, too inexpressive, to deal with something as conceptually complex as color."

References

External links

* *
Harold Cohen
at

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

1928 births 2016 deaths Artificial intelligence art British artificial intelligence researchers British digital artists University of California, San Diego faculty British contemporary artists British people of Polish-Jewish descent {{UK-painter-20thC-stub