The Robotic Artist: AARON in Living Color

Harold Cohen at a The Computer Museum, 1995

 h Robotic Artist:
A r n in Living Color

H rold Cohen
at

mThe omputer Museum

April 1- May 29, 1995
Introduction to "The Robotic Artist: AARON in Living Color."
"I write programs. Programs make drawings." Harold Cohen's matter-of-fact description of
his life's work belies the incredible challenge of what he set out to do 25 years ago: nothing
less than design a computer that knows how to create Cohen's art, totally unassisted.

By 1969, Cohen had established himself as one of Britain's foremost artists, showing in one-
man shows in major museums around the world. With great courage, he turned away from a
traditional artist's career to begin working with computers. Using the mainframe and
minicomuters of the 1970's at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, he began to develop the
suite of programs that came to be know as AARON.

Since 1979, visitors to The Computer Museum have been fascinated by his work. In
Marlboro, Massachusetts, the Museum's first site, brilliant murals, enlarged by hand from
machine output and colored by Cohen, adorned the main Museum hall. At Museum Wharf in
Boston from 1987, AARON has been drawing a unique image each day in the Museum's
Smart Machines gallery. And now Cohen has met the toughest challenge - color. The
system not only knows what color it wants, but actually applies it to paper.

The Computer Museum is very fortunate to present the world premiere of "AARON in Living
Color" - a tour de force of art, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

The Museum extends grateful thanks to Gordon and Gwen Bell and the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence for generously funding the exhibit. We also thank American Airlines
for shipping and Silicon Graphics for loaning equipment. Thanks, also, to Becky Cohen for
her design of this document and for a conversation that reveals a great deal of the artist's
motivations. Finally, of course, we are indebted to Harold Cohen for sharing his remarkable
achievement with us!

Oliver Strimpel, Executive Director, The Computer Museum.

Artist's Acknowledgments
This exhibition rests upon the friendship, encouragement and support of many individuals and
several corporations, offered and gratefully received over two decades. I cannot list them all
here, but I will name Gwen and Gordon Bell, Robert and Deborah Hendel, and Pamela
McCorduck as having played special parts for me in the most recent phase of AARON's
development.

This is not the kind of enterprise that one can pull off single-handedly, and I know to what
degree this exhibition has rested upon the unstinting work of the members of my studio team.
I would like to acknowledge their contributions here. Fang Chen wrote a graphical interface
command interpreter that greatly simplified the debugging of the painting machine and
continues to enable development. Payton White was largely responsible for the most recent
implementation of the painting machine control program. Kristin Valgardson produced and
measured more than a thousand samples of dye mixtures.

I have always been extremely fortunate in my assistants, but even against this background
two people have earned a special measure of gratitude. Nina Karavasiles was my studio
assistant for several years before she returned, recently, to graduate school. I cannot begin
to describe how valuable she has been to me. Val Valgardson, my research assistant, built
almost all of the painting machine from my designs, and has handled much of its develop-
ment, bringing to bear a level of commitment artists most often reserve for their own work.
He has become more collaborator than assistant, more friend than student.

Harold Cohen, March, 1995.

 CONVERSATION
HAROLD COHEN & BECKY COHEN
La Jolla, California, March, 1995

BC. AARON has been making drawings autonomously for more than two decades, and
now you are celebrating its new ability to color its drawings with dyes and special brushes.
How did you get it to paint?

HC. Putting dye on paper is easy: you just build a machine! This one consists of a small
robot arm carried around over a large flat table on what we call an "xy device." The arm has
a "hand" that's able to pick up the cups and brushes that are located at the edges of the
table, manipulate the taps on bottles of dyes, and so on.

Of course I'm joking about it being easy to build a painting machine. But the truth is that it
was a relatively straightforward task compared with writing the code that would give
AARON the ability to think about color. That has been my major pre-occupation the past
two or three years, and there would have been no point in building a machine if I hadn't
been able to do it.

BC. Of course, what people can see in the museum is the machine painting. What they
can't see is how AARON is thinking about color. Can you describe how the coloring pro-
gram works? Why was it a difficult problem?

HC. For many reasons. Consider, to begin with, that human beings can see the results
of putting two colors next to each other, and can proceed on the basis of this feedback. The
program is able to keep a very complete record of what it's doing, but it can't see in the
same sense that you or I can see. I had to come up with rules about color juxtaposition that
would serve in place of the visual feedback that humans use. As a painter, with a lifetime of
experience of color, I must obviously have known what some of those rules were, yet I
found it frustratingly difficult to say what they were.

BC. Presumably you needed some sort of feedback in trying to develop the rules for
coloring, but you were working on that problem before you had the painting machine.

HC. I did most of the color development in a screen-based version, using a Silicon
Graphics workstation. At the same time I knew there would be a big problem in transferring
these results to the painting machine. I wasn't even sure it could be done.

BC. Why?

HC. Well, a color workstation does "additive" mixing. There are only three primaries -
red, green and blue. All colors are made by mixing them. You are mixing light, and, conse-
quently, the more you add the brighter the result. For example, on the screen you get
yellow by adding red and green together. People generally find that hard to believe, be-
cause it doesn't seem to correspond to experience. Actually it does; but most color mixing
in the physical world is "subtractive" mixing. When you mix red and green paint together
each color filters out some part of the visible spectrum. The result is still in the yellow part
of the spectrum, but so much light has been filtered out that we would
describe it as dirty brown rather than yellow.

I did eventually come up with a screen-based solution that functioned rather

well. In fact, I was able to use AARON's screen-based coloring designs for
the last group of paintings I made, in some cases almost without modifica-

Early, AARON drawing, 1975.

tion. I photographed the images off the screen and used the slides rather the way a painter
might use a color sketch. I've never used sketches before; it was a rather interesting
change for me.

BC. Were you then able to map the rules you had built for the screen-based coloring
program onto the coloring program for the painting machine?

HC. Well, actually not. I spent some time trying to translate the red-green-blue mixtures
that AARON specified into combinations of the dyes I was using, but it never worked to my
satisfaction. It turned out that I could only translate about half of AARON's colors; rather
obvious, actually, since dyes can't possibly be as bright as the colors you see on the
screen. Finally I abandoned that approach and started to build up a new version based
directly upon the dyes.

BC. Shouldn't that have been easier for you? After all, you've
spent your life working with physical color, not with colored light.

HC. Perhaps. But the fifteen different colors of the dyes I

use aren't evenly distributed along the spectrum, and they can
act in very peculiar ways. In fact, any physical material acts in
peculiar ways - not at all well-behaved and predictable the
way light is. These dyes have been formulated for bulk-dying
fabrics, not for painting. On the paper, for instance, you can start
with what you think is a very vivid forest green in the pot and finish
up with a rather dull green surrounded by outlines of yellow on the
paper. My current task is to continue to build an adequate knowledge
base about how all these materials behave and at the same time to
modify the materials themselves so that they behave a little better.

I'd much preferred to have used oil paint, which I've always found to be the
most versatile and the most beautiful of media. It wouldn't have been at all
practical for the painting machine, unfortunately. Oil paint is a more or less
transparent material, and you have to control the thickness of the paint film
rather precisely to get the most from it. My machine is much too crude a device to do that;
in fact, I'm not sure that any current robot could exercise that level of control.

BC. What kind of dyes have you chosen for AARON to use? And why dyes? Do they
suffer from impermanence?

HC. Oh no, not at all. That was true in the nineteenth century, with some of the earliest
industrial dyes, but no longer. I have a shirt that's been in the Californian sun for almost two
decades and in and out of the washing machine I don't know how many times; it still has
most of its original color.

I've been using these Procion fabric dyes for several years for working on paper; they're
very beautiful in color and they all rate six or seven on a permanence scale from one to
seven. I thought I knew them very well. I didn't know them quite as well as I thought I did.

BC. Well, you probably haven't used them to this sort of stretch before.

HC. Right.

BC. After listening to this technical description about what you consid-
ered in creating your rule base for coloring, I'm also wondering what other
kinds of knowledge have found their way into the part of AARON that
colors: your own background, for instance. You are English. You estab-

2
AARON, 1976.
 Iished yourself as an artist, a painter, and you are obviously very much aware of European
art. Does some part of this experience affect what sense of meaningfulness you code into
the coloring program?

HC. Since I bring nearly fifty years of experience as a painter to the problem of coloring,
I suppose one has to make that assumption, but I'm sure one couldn't find evidence for it
one way or the other just by looking at the code.

BC. Let's talk a bit more about what I guess you would call the AARON system since it
now includes the painting machine. In your installation there are two different computers,
one for generating the drawings, complete with coloring, the other for running the painting
machine. What programming languages do you use?

HC. AARON is written in LISP and runs on a Silicon Graphics computer, while the
painting machine is controlled by a PC - a generic 486 - and the program is written in
C++.

When AARON generates a painting, it stores it in a file as a set of instructions. Most of

these instructions will control the movement of the brush on the paper, both in making the
initial drawing and in filling in the color. Some of them specify the mixing of dyes for indi-
vidual areas of the painting, and some of them specify the size of brush to be used. The file
is read over a network connection by the 486 which then interprets those instructions and
scales the dimensions of the Silicon Graphics screen to whatever size drawing is being
made. It also scales the volume of the dye to be mixed for any color and the size of the
brush, and then it generates the lowest-level commands that drive the painting machine.

To do everything it is supposed to do, the 486 program has to control the movement of the
arm across the table, the horizontal rotation of the shoulder, the vertical rotation of the
elbow, two rotations of the wrist, the opening and closing of the hand, and the reach - how
far the hand can extend from the elbow. The program also has to know where the cups and
brushes are kept, where the tap handles are and how much to move them up and down,
and so on.

BC. So, the order of events is: AARON first generates the drawing, then
the coloring for the drawing, and finally sends orders to the 486. AARON
never thinks about coloring before drawing, does it?

He. No, the drawing is done first and then AARON decides about
color. But the coloring part doesn't only involve the color choice. It must
also map out the path the brush must take filling in the various shapes
in the drawing.

Be. Yes, I could see the brush following the internal contours of
shapes as it was coloring; but it seems that AARON must also have a
sense of portraiture: that it has some idea of what sorts of color might be
good for face and hands, what colors might be good for clothing, or plants.

He. Oh sure. AARON has a very clear idea of what it is doing.

Be. How does AARON assign color?

HC. In AARON's understanding of the drawings, different elements are

characterised by their different attributes. It knows, for example, that a
face has two eyes, and it will never draw a face with three. To the degree
that color is also an attribute of a face, there are a limited number of colors
it can use. It would never decide to paint a face green because it doesn't
believe that faces can be green. However, there is no such limitation on

AARON, from the "Amsterdam Suite," 1975.

3
the assignment of colors to things
like sweaters or backgrounds. Color
assignment here reflects the program's
concern for the color "signature" of
the whole painting. If AARON
decides to do a red sweater, for ex-
ample, it will probably not decide to do a
red background.

BC. Ah! So, this is an ad hoc style of

reasoning similar to your earliest AARON
drawing program, the purpose of which was to
simulate human free-hand drawing. You never
meant to mimic existing drawings but to model
how drawings are produced by human beings. You
seem to be treating the generation of coloring in the
same way ... which leads me to ask whether you
consider speculation through reasoning to be at the heart of what you do
as an artist?

HC. I suppose I do. But then, you've put your finger on the central problem in providing
AARON with knowledge about the use of color. It is not entirely clear how human artists
handle color internally. It is certainly not clear that we reason about it.

BC. But you can reason about drawing. Why the one and not the other?

HC. Well, not everything that goes on in the head is reasoning, or even thinking, if what
one means by thinking is the symbolic representation that has to precede any utterance we
make. When I started work on the painting version of AARON I was struck by the fact that
we have a very poor vocabulary for talking about color relationships, and that almost all of
what's been written as color theory has been either theory about color perception or theory
about color measurement. There is almost nothing about color use.

I've never tried to simulate my own work, but whenever I find myself faced with a problem
about how the program should proceed, I've asked myself how I would proceed. I was
deeply frustrated to find that I couldn't describe what was happening in my own head when
I was manipulating color as a painter.

BC. Nevertheless you did find a way into the problem.

HC. There is one small piece of knowledge, which I've been handing out to painting
students as long as I've been teaching. Heaven knows why it took me so long to recognize
it as a key to my own concerns. It is that the most important single thing about color is not
spectral hue; it's how light or dark it is. Actually that's not too strange; the eye functions
mostly as a brightness perceptor. Color vision seems to be more of a luxury than a survival
mechanism in human beings.

BC. You're talking about how light or dark something is in relation to its neighbor.
Within your system of painting, shapes sharing a common border can be differentiated by
both hue and brightness. The difference that one can see between one shape and another
can actually indicate spatiality.

HC. Certainly.

BC. You avoid regular perspective yet you have ways of indicating
space. Your pictures tend to be sort of two-and-a-half dimensional: not 2d,
not 3d, but somewhere in between - sort of like Pompeiian frescoes.

4
AARON, drawing for the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art mural, 1979.
 He. But all representation is two-and-a-half dimensional, isn't it? The viewer is always
confronted with a flat surface that evokes something in the physical - 3-dimensional -
world.

Be. But still, there are clear differences between Pompeiian frescoes and the work of
Masaccio, say, or a Rembrandt.

He. Or between African Bushman art, or Persian miniatures, or Australian Aboriginal

art, and European art. It seems to me that the last five hundred years of western culture
have been quite aberrant with respect to world history. At no other time in human history
will you find our own characteristic obsession with appearances, nor its consequence,
which led to the underlying technology both for photography and for computer graphics -
the reflection of light off the surfaces of things in the world. That's a mystery to me. Do we
really believe that we can find out truth by the way things look?

Be. The mathematical and visual consideration of three dimensional space that Ucello,
Piero della Francesca and others gave us through the invention of perspective seems to
have been fairly useful in the practice of architecture or war or tracking movement through
space.

He. No doubt. But let's not overlook the underlying philosophical position of the Renais-
sance that gives rise to perspective, which proposes that man is central in the universe and
that the eye of man is the point through which to regard everything. Do we hold to that
position at the end of the twentieth century?

Regarding spatial representation from that time forward, there are a number of different
way of writing history. One possible way is to say that as soon as it became possible to
actualize perspective - considering photography as a mode of representation without
human invervention - artists lost interest in it as a way of making images.

You can also write history to say that artists never were that interested in perspective. Most
of the major painters played games around the edges of perspective. It has been a device
for lending plausibility to an image, but even Uccello seems to have been much more
interested in the geometry of the flat surface than in anything evoked in the physical world.
Perspective has always been a kind of academic backbone to painting. Aside from its
inventors, I don't think it has ever been considered the central issue by painters.

Be. So, in the spatiality you've invented for AARON, in the coloring part of the program,
it comes down to an instruction in the program saying you can have this hue or that hue,
but really the most important thing is the shift in brightness between adjacent hues. This is
one means of defining depth, but what about the drawing program? Do you have any rules
for perspective in AARON?

He. Oh sure. To the degree that perspective has to do with the sizes of objects relative
to their distance from the viewer, AARON deploys a more-or-Iess conventional perspective.

Be. That's true. You have large figures in the foreground, but you don't have a horizon-
tal line indicating deep space.

He. No, I don't have deep space, not in recent work, any way. But, you know, this linear
perspective we talk about is only a part of what the Renaissance invented. The more
important part was the seperation of drawing and coloring; the idea that you
should build a representation by starting with a monochrome underpainting
dealing with the amount of light reflected off surfaces, and only then con-
cern yourself with local color applied over the top of the underpainting.

AARON, "ANIMS," 1980. 5

"Nancy with potted plant," painting 60 x 84", oil on canvas, (computer generated drawing), 1991; collection Robert and Deborah Hendel.
 The point is that AARON doesn't know anything about surfaces. European I may be, but I
throw in my lot - and AARON's - with much older and much less pedestrian modes of
representation.

Be. You seem to have created a sort of magical space where AARON's "organisms",
figures, and plants have a special interrelationship with each other. Even in the room-like
environments, it is as if the figures have a truly imaginative relationship with each other.

He. I must obviously hesitate on the word "imaginative" because that implies capabili-
ties to the program that I know perfectly well that the program doesn't have. AARON's
domain of expertise is the building of representations, not knowledge of the outside world.
Hmm ... Well, it has some knowledge of the outside world.

"CLARRISA," painting 42 x 54", oil on canvas, (computer generated drawing), 1992.

Be. Like what?

He. For example, it knows how people are put together. It knows how they are capable
of moving. It knows how plants grow. It knows that rooms have walls at the back. It knows
all of those things, though that isn't to say that it knows them in the same way that you or I
know them. I suspect that whatever success the program has had has
rested upon devising a representational mode perfectly fitted to the struc-
ture of its knowledge.

Be. Is drawing less interesting to you now than it was before you
became involved with color?

AARON , 1983.
7
 "Meryl," painting 24 x 34", oil on canvas, (computer generated drawing), 1993; collection Robert and Deborah Hendel.

He. Not really. I think I would say that I want to define a mode of representation in
which color is a central element, not a decorative afterthought.

Be. What you are talking about is something that certainly interested the impression-
ists, but your own desire seems for color to have meaning superior to that of drawing.

He. No, just how to make color the central organizing principle.

Be. If I am remembering correctly, one of your experiments as a painter (before you left
England and met your first computer) was to eliminate drawing altogether.

He. That's true. During the '60's, I became so involved with the issue of color that I
found myself literally pushing drawing off the edge of the canvas.

Be. What made you think that you had to reintroduce

drawing?

He. The preoccupation with color is something that

goes back a long way for me, but it is also something that
had to be put on the back burner for a very long time
once I started working with computers. Bear in mind that
there would have been no way for me to work on color
with the computing resources we had twenty-five years
ago. I became almost exclusively preoccupied with
drawing, and tried to answer a very fundamental question
for myself: what are the minimum conditions under which
a set of marks on a flat surface functions as an image.

Be. It seems to me that the very question implies a

certain discontent about having reduced
your painting to a minimal colored surface.

He. That's the way it seems to me too.

In fact, I would go further; I was becoming

"Aaron with decorative panel," painting 54 x 72", oil on

8 AARON, 1985.
canvas, (computer generated drawing), 1992.
Painting 54 x 72", oil on canvas, (computer generated drawing), 1993.
increasingly disturbed and antipathetic towards the whole modernist movement in painting,
in art. We had turned painting into a very specialized game that only a very few people
could understand and respond to. I've always felt that the health of any art depends upon
its relationship to the culture that is serves, and I wasn't happy with where I stood. I don't
want this to sound more conscious an aim than it was at the time - 1968 - but I suppose
that in turning away from color to spend several years investigating drawing, I was begin-
ning to look for a way of getting back to a kind of imagery that would be available to more
people.

Be. Listening to what you've just told me, it seems that you reinvented drawing as a
means of reinventing color.

He. Well, it turned out that way. Over time I began to think that there was something
slightly unsatisfactory about having AARON do all these drawings that I was then required
to color.

Be. I recall you saying, many years ago, that you reserve the coloring for yourself. On
the other hand, you have always had this deeper drive to make your speculative machine
thoroughly autonomous.

He. "Autonomous" is a relativistic term. Even though AARON now has a good grip on
the problem of coloring, there are still many other things the program has to take
responsiblility for that it doesn't quite yet.

Be. You continue to teach AARON new things, but it seems to me that from the begin-
ning of your dialogue with your creation, you have always wanted its work to qualify accord-
ing to your own high standards of interest, use, and beauty.

He. Of course; why would I demand less of it? One of the bargains I made with myself
from the very earliest days was that I would never accept the position of having to apolo-
gize because this was done by a computer. I have always insisted that the work the
program did would have to stand on equal terms with art made by hand.

Be. You mean, art made by the artist?

He. Yes. But not necessarily this artist. As I said earlier, it has never been my intention
to simulate my own work.

Be. Still you want what you've modelled in AARON and AARON's drawings to be truly
within the domain of the endeavor of art. Presumably that is why you've spent so much
time running the other way from so-called "computer art".

He. Yes. But I should say that my goals have changed subtly over the years. For a very
long time I thought AARON's work should be indistinguishable from the work made by
human artists. That isn't quite the case any more. I want the work to look as if it has been
made by an intelligence, but it doesn't have to be a human intelligence. I am much happier
now when I see the program produce an image that looks as if it had been made by
somebody who is seeing the world for the first time: seeing the world from a different point
of view than someone who grew up human.

Be. So, you want a whole new language?

He. No, not a whole new language. If it was a whole new language
nobody could understand it at all. I would like AARON's work to look to the
human viewer the way, for example, African sculpture must have looked to
western artists at the end of the 19th century. They knew it was made by

10 AARON, 1985.
 people somewhere, but these people were from a different, even alien, culture. Their art
had very little to do with European traditons of art-making, yet for Picasso, looking at
African sculpture provided a whole new way of thinking about painting. I would like
AARON's work to have that kind of alien-ness. I don't want it to look as if yet another
human artist had made an image of yet another human being.

Be. You give AARON a rather innocent quality, placing it just at the boundary of discov-
ery all the time. I am wondering if you are ever surprised by any of the actions AARON
takes. Does it ever seem to know something that you don't know?

He. Of course, I know exactly what AARON knows, but I can still be surprised. When
you work on a program as I've worked on AARON, you make the program the heir to
some subset of your own knowledge. When it plays that knowledge back to you, you
can find yourself saying, "Hey, where did that come from? I didn't realize that that is
what I believe." In that sense the whole endeavor is quite a shocking and remark-
able experience. Of course I'm not thinking of knowledge as a mere collection of
facts.

I suppose I am in the position of being entirely

responsible for someone else's education. I go on
feeding facts and numbers and positions and
opinions and beliefs into this someone, and it turns
out finally that I hadn't really put in what I thought I
had at all.

Be. What you said about knowledge makes

sense to me because knowledge isn't static. It has
direction. We can't form a question unless it is from a
certain knowledge base and a certain desire.

He. Knowledge base and belief system and desire, as

you say. This is the problem that faces every parent: how to
create an autonomous individual that you can still communi-
cate with.

Be. Ha! Right, you can't create a pure entity. You are always
teaching it something that you don't realize you are teaching it.
Which reminds me ... you invented a special word for this in relation
to programming AARON: "entitality," isn't it? By this you mean that
the machine has the equivalent of personality. What you're really
doing is looking down on what you've created and realizing that there
is some signature to it that wasn't part of your original intention but
that is certainly very specific to the system that you are responsible
for.

He. Yes.

Be. This all has to do with the question of what knowledge is, and
whether you know what you know. In fact, one is likely not to until
some piece of knowledge is called forth by some specific need.
Building a model as a way of exploring one's
knowledge produces results that ...

He. You don't quite recognize.

11
AARON, "athletes," 1985.
 Be. I don't know how this
would trouble scientists, but how
does it sit with an artist?

He. It depends. I am always

delighted when it does things that I
don't expect except for those times
when I am not delighted with what it
does. I never intervene on the level of a
single drawing; in fact, I've never provided
myself with any way of intervening. Yet if it
makes drawings that indicate a direction I
don't want to go in, I will change the program.
I'll make whatever modifications are necessary
to take it in what I thnk is a reasonable direc-
tion.

Be. Yet AARON has taught you something.

He. AARON is teaching me things all the way

down the line. From the beginning it has always been
very much a two-way interaction. I have learned things about what I want from AARON
that I could never have learned without AARON.

Be. So, this decades-long conversation with AARON has enabled you to build on your
understanding of your own knowledge. AARON is probably the oldest, continuously-
developed program in computing history at this point. It has also allowed you to create a
new medium for yourself as an artist, even to redefine what we mean by art.

He. Interestingly enough, I think the very age of the program contributes a great deal to
the quality of what it does. What ever else happens after twenty years of continuous
development, AARON has a kind of complexity about it that you don't get when you sit
down and knock off a program in three months or three years.

Be. Who are the people in the pictures that AARON draws right now?

He. Oh, well! One of them turned out to be someone I taught as a graduate student
years ago. One of them is a graceful black woman whom I have never met but who I think
would be wonderful to talk to. The amazing thing to me is the frequency with which the
drawings turn out to look like people I know. Sometimes I will be having coffee with one of
my assistants in the university coffee shop and she will look across the room and say, "That
woman there looks just like one of your drawings."

Of course, there are no human models, and the program is not attempting to portray any
given individual. Only once did I ever get it to portray a particular person with reasonable
sucess, and I found the enterprise rather uncomfortable, boring. It was like manipulating a
rather complicated police identikit. I didn't enjoy it at all. In fact, I rather thought that the
people AARON portrays, having no one in mind at all, were more interesting looking
people. As drawings, that is; no reflection on the model.

Be. It sounds like, even now, you are still dealing with the idea of the
evocative computer that you began in the early '70's after we went out to
look at petroglyphs. They conveyed meaningfulness even though their
original meanings are lost to us.

He. Yes. I have never subscribed to what I once called the telecommu-
nication model of art: the artist has something in mind which is encoded in

12 AARON, "bathers," 1986.

 a message and sent across the art medium, or the internet, or whatever, and is then
recieved and decoded, with the result that the audience understands just what the artist
had in mind.

I don't think the artist ever transmits what he has in mind and I don't think the audience
ever knows what the artist has in mind. The artist is concerned with the design of meaning
generators, not meaning communicators. The power of the program still is that it is capable
of generating some personality on a piece of paper; it will initiate some response on the
part of the viewer in terms of what the viewer knows about human personality and human
experience.

Be. Whatever the human viewer might speculate looking at your drawings, certainly,
the speculation has to lead back to you.

He. Not really to the degree you might think. If I said earlier that it was never my
intention to have AARON simulate what I do, it is because I have always felt that what I do
on a cognitive level is just about exactly what everybody else does. My goal always was to
try to uncover the general cognitive practice, not my own particular one.

Be. What traditional artistic goals have you been escaping for the last quarter century
by casting your lot with artificial intelligence? What artistic future are you indicating with
your work?

He. I am not sure I am escaping any goals, or even trying to. Oh, of course it isn't exactly
traditional to have a machine generate one's artworks. But - in the twentieth century,
certainly - art making is a highly self-reflective activity, and what is central is the degree to
which the making of art contributes to an ongoing dialogue about the nature of art. In that
sense I think my work is absolutely orthodox.

As for the future, I don't know. Public attitudes towards computers are by no means
neutral. In a market-driven society the manufacturer shoots for the biggest possible, not for
the most sophisticated, market. The result is that the vast majority of users today identify
the computer as a box on which to run ready made packages. That is not what I do. There
is no package for what I do, and there couldn't possibly be. It seems to me that using one
would be absolutely antithetical to the artists' position. It would imply that someone else is
in a position to tell me what I am supposed to be doing.

Be. Or what you need to do.

He. More to the point. I am in the fortunate position of having been in this game from
the time when there weren't any packages to be bought. There was no choice in the
matter; if you wanted a program, you wrote one. That's not the case now, and it would take
an extraordinary act of insight on the part of a young artist to conclude that to have real
power you must do your own programming.

Be. You sound as if you wouldn't use a package under any circumstances.

He. Oh no, that's not the case. I use a computer-aided design package for designing
machinery. I use a word processor that I didn't write myself. I wouldn't dream of writing my
own communication package. I am still using my own accounting package, but that is
because I can't be bothered to learn a new one. It's always cheaper in the long run to buy
something than to make it yourself; but you can only do that safely when
there is perfect accord about what the package is supposed to do.

Perhaps someone will come along who will see the readily available, off-
the-shelf capabilities - Photoshop, whatever - as being just exactly what

AARON, 1990.
13
he or she wants and will produce major art by this means. It's just not my way of doing
things. I inevitably get nervous about the notion that somebody could make art without a
profound grasp of the underlying disciplines involved. That doesn't mean that it won't
happen, obviously; merely that it doesn't look as if the future is going in my direction.

BC. You mean in the direction of free-thinking autodidacticism, I think. Well, what about
the near future? What are you doing tomorrow?

HC. I have to make covers over the motors on the painting machine so that children
won't get their fingers caught.

14
HAROLD COHEN: RESUME. Retrospective Exhibition,
Scottish Arts CouncilGaliery, Edinburgh.1976.
Diploma in Fine Arts, University of London.1951. Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Aberdeen.1976.
Abbey (Rome) Scholarship.1951. The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.1977.
Lecturer in Art History, Camberwell School of Art, "Harold Cohen: An Artist's Use of the Computer".
London. 1952-54. Arts Council of Great Britain Exhibition Tour:
Fellow in Fine Art, University of Nottingham.1956-59. 1978-79
Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund, New "Harold Cohen: Drawing"
York.1959-61. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.1979.
Lecturer in Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Mass. 1982.
London.1961-65. The Brooklyn Museum.1983.
Visitor, Slade School of Fine Art, London.1965-68. National Museum of Wales. 1983.
Departmental Visitor, Coventry College of Art.1965-68. The Tate Gallery, London. 1983.
Visiting Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. 1983.
UC San Diego. 1968-69. Buhl Science Center, Pittsburgh.1984.
Professor and Chairman, Visual Arts Department,
UC San Diego. 1969-71. SMALL GROUP and TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
Professor, Visual Arts Department,
UC San Diego.1971-1994. "Four Englishmen", Milan.1966.
Visiting Professor, Art Department, UC Berkeley. "Two Decorative Works by Henri Matisse and Harold
Fall 1973. Cohen" Tate Gallery, London.1966.
Visiting Scholar, Computer Science Department, "33rd Venice Biennale" 1966.
(Artificial Intelligence Lab) Stanford University. "Four Artists from Southern California", Reese Paley
1973-75. Gallery, San Francisco.1968.
Visiting Andrew Mellon Professor of Computer Art and "Prints by Harold Cohen and Bernard Cohen",
Research Fellow of the Robotics Lab, Marlborough Gallery, London.1972.
Carnegie-Mellon University. Spring 1984. "TSUKUBA-EXPO 85" US Pavilion, World Fair:
Artist in Residence, Ontario Science Center. represented the US with "AARON," as one
Summer 1984. of four exhibits on Expert Systems. 1985.
Director, Center for Research in Computing and the
Arts, UC San Diego. 1992-present. GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Emeritus Professor, UC San Diego. 1994-present.
"Abstract Impressionism", London and tour.1960.
ONE-PERSON EXHIBITIONS "Situations", London.1960.
"New London Situations", London.1961.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.1950. "Deuxieme Biennale de Paris", Paris and tour.1961.
Gimpel Fils Gallery, London.1954. "Carnegie International", Pittsburgh.1961.
Gimpel Fils Gallery, London.1956. "British Art Today", San Francisco, Dallas and
Art Gallery, University of Nottingham.1956. Santa Barbara.1961 .
Gimpel Fils Gallery, London.1958. "Tokyo Biennale", Tokyo.1963.
Art Gallery, University of Nottingham. 1959. "British Painting", Australia and Japan tour.1963-64.
Alan Stone Gallery, New York.1961. "British Painting in the Sixties", London.1963.
Robert Fraser Gallery, London.1962. Milan Triennale, Milan.1963.
Alan Stone Gallery, New York.1963. "Dunne International", London and Canada tour.
Robert Fraser Gallery, London.1963. 1963-64
Whitechapel Gallery, London. (Retrospective) 1964. "Premio de Lissone", Milan.1963.
Jerrold Morris Gallery, Toronto.1967. "Profile III - Englische Kunst", Bochum.1964.
Musee d'Art Contemporain, Montreal.1967. "Documenta 111", Kasse1.1964.
The Art Gallery, Vancouver.1967. "Britische Malerie der Gegenwart", Dusseldorf .1964.
Art Studio Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark.1968. "A Decade of Painting and Sculpture",
Robert Fraser Gallery, London.1968. Tate Gallery, London.1964.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London: "IVth Biennale des Jeunes", Paris.1965.
tapestries and textiles designed by Harold Cohen: "London, the New Scene", Minneapolis, Washington,
with tour of British Museums.1968. Boston, Seattle, Vancouver.1965.
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.1968. "British Painting Today", Hamburg.1966.
Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.1968. "English Graphic Art", Cologne.1966.
Curwen Gallery, London. 1968. "Aspects of British Art",
"A Computer-controlled Drawing Machine" Australia and NewZealand.1966.
Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1971. "Carnegie International", Pittsburgh.1967.
"Three Behaviors for the Partitioning of Space" "Young British Painters", Brussels.1967.
Los Angeles County Museum.1972. "The Stuyvesant Foundation Collection",
The Art Gallery, San Diego State College.1972. Tate Gallery, London.1967.
"Machine Generated Images" La Jolla Museum.1973. "Northern Ireland International", Belfast.1968.
"Drawings by Hand / Drawings by Machine" "Artists from Southern California",
The Art Department Gallery, U.C. Berkeley.1974. Mills College, Oakland.1969.
"New Drawings" The Art Gallery, Sacramento State "Superlimited", Jewish Museum, New York.1969.
University.1974. "Recent Prints by Some British Painters and
 Sculptors", National Museum of Modern Art, University of London.
Tokyo.l970. University of Nottingham.
"2nd British International Print Biennale", University of Warwick.
Bradford City Art Gallery.1970. The Art Gallery of Toronto.
"White Paintings", La Jolla Museum.1970. The Peter Stuyvesant Foundation.
"Small Works", UCSD. Art Gallery.1970. The British Petroleum Company.
"Prints from the KELPRA Studio", Jews College, London.
Hayward Gallery. London 1970. The National Gallery of Western Australia.
"Computer Art", Oberlin College.1972. The National Gallery of Northern Ireland.
"Contributors Exhibition", International Sculpture The National Museum of Wales
Conference, Lawrence Kansas .1974. The Bristol Art Gallery.
Faculty Exhibition, UCSD.1976. The Los Angeles County Museum.
"Artists at Curwen" Tate Gallery, London.1977. The City of Birmingham Art Museum.
Drawing Invitational Exhibition, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Fine Arts Gallery, San Diego. 1977. The City of Sheffield Art Museum.
Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany.1977. The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
"Images of Ourselves" Tate Gallery, London. 1980. The Digital Equipment Corporation
"Faculty Exhibition, UCSD.1980. Muir College, U.C.San Diego.
"The Kelpra Studio: Artists' Prints 1961-80" Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Tate Gallery, London. 1980. Brooklyn Museum.
"Master Weavers - Tapestry from the Dovecot Studios" Scottish Life Insurance Company.
Edinburgh Festival.1980. Glasgow City Art Gallery.
"Landscape: The Printmaker's View" The Arnolfini Trust, Bristol.
Tate Gallery, London.1980. Yale Center for British Art.
"Black and White American Drawing, 1970-80"
Brooklyn Museum, NY. 1980. PUBLIC COMMISSIONS
"Mapped Art" 1981-83
University of Colorado Art Gallery: Wall-Hanging for the Milan Triennale.1963.
University of Texas Art GallerY,Austin. Tapestry for the British Petroleum Company.1965.
Arkansas Arts Center. Tapestry for the Victoria and Albert Museum.1967.
Toledo Museum of Art. Two murals for Digital Equipment Corporation 1980.
UCSD. Visual Arts Faculty Exhibition.1984. Mural for Capitol Children's Museum, Wash. DC.1980.
"The Machine as a Young Artist" Mosaic mural for Stanford University, 1981.
Ontario Science Center, Toronto.1984. Mural for the Buhl Science Center, Pittsburgh.1984.
"Taking Liberty" Exhibition of Images of the Statue of Mural for the Ontario Science Center, Toronto.1984.
Liberty, New York State Museum.1986. Mural for the Digital Equipment Corporation, 1986.
"Robots and Beyond: The Age of Intelligent Machines" Tapestry design for the Edinburgh Tapestry Company.
The Boston Museum of Science.1987 1986.
The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.1987
Discovery Place, Charlotte NC. 1988. BOOKS
Museum of Science and History, 1988
California Museum of Science and Industry, "The Homecoming" Edition de Luxe of the play by
Los Angeles 1988. Harold Pinter, Curwen Press, 1966
Science Museum of Minnesota, St Paul.1988. "Drawing for Machine and Four Hands"
Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. 1989. Limited edition photo-record and notes on
Center for Science and Industry, Columbus, 1989. the large-scale wall piece by that name,
"Smart Machines" Boston Computer Museum Becky Cohen and Harold Cohen. May 1976.
1987 - present. "15 Flower World Variations" Poems by Jerome
"Computers and Art" The Everson Museum, Rothenberg, Drawings by Harold Cohen.
Syracuse.1987. MEMBRANE PRESS.1984.
"Digital Visions" "The First Artificial Intelligence Coloring Book"
The IBM Gallery of Art and Science, With Becky Cohen and Penny NiL
NYC. 1988. WILLIAM KAUFMAN.1984.
"UCSD Faculty Art '88" Mandeville Art Gallery,
UCSD.1988.
"Alternate Applications: Computer Technology in the BIBLIOGRAPHY: WRITING BY HAROLD COHEN
Arts" Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, UCSC.1989.
"Meet the AI" HARP Exhibition, Tokyo. 1989. "Parallel to Perception" Proceedings of the Edinburgh
Conference on Art and Computing.1973.
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Reprinted, COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES &
Tate Gallery, London VERBAL BEHAVIOR. 1973.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Reprinted in "Aspects: The Computer in the Visual
The Arts Council of Great Britain. Arts" 1981.
The British Council. "On Purpose" STUDIO INTERNATIONAL.1974.
The Gulbenkian Foundation. "Getting a Clear Picture" Bulletin of the American
The Contemporary Art Society, London. Society for Information Science. 1975.
Leicestershire Education Committee. "The Material of Symbols" First Annual Symposium on
 Symbols and Symbol Processes, University of Lord Snowdon.1968.
Nevada 1976. "THE PAINTER AND THE PHOTOGRAPH"
Reprinted, New Wilderness Newsletter, Van Deren Coke, Univ. New Mexico
Vol. #1.January 1977. Press.1971.
"What is an Image?" Invited paper, proceedings of the "ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA YEARBOOK ON
6th International Joint Conference on Artificial SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE" Section on
Intelligence,Tokyo. 1979. Art and Technology, Jack Burnham.1973.
"On Technology" International Festival of Electronic "Harold Cohen on Art and the Machine" Moira Roth,
Music, Video and Computer Art.1981. ART IN AMERICA.1978.
Catalogue Statement for "Harold Cohen" exhibition, "ROBOTS: Fact, Fiction and Prediction"
Tate Gallery, London.1983. Jasia Reichardt, Thames & HudsonlViking/
"Expert Systems and Expert's Systems" Penguin Books.1978.
Invited Paper, Proceedings, NICOGRAPH '85 "On Harold Cohen's Drawings" Andrew Forge.
International Symposium. Tokyo. 1985. Catalogue Introduction for San Francisco
"Off the Shelf" THE VISUAL COMPUTER 3/86, Museum of Modern Art. 1979.
Springer International 1986 "An Interview With Harold Cohen" Curtis Roads.
"Art, AI in" Contributor, "ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMPUTER MUSIC JOURNALVol. 3, #4,
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE" issue 12.December 1979.
Wiley Interscience.1987. "Harold Cohen" Catalogue essay for Tate exhibition
"How to Draw Three People in a Botanical Garden" catalogue, Michael Compton, Keeper of Art,
Invited Paper, Conference Proceedings, Tate Gallery.1983.
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "Creativity and Computers" Catalogue essay for Tate
1988. exhibition catalogue, Margaret Boden, 1983.
"Brother Giorgio's Kangaroo" "Harold Cohen" Prof. Herbert W. Franke,
"THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES" COMPUTERGRAFIX-GALERIE.1984.
Raymond Kurzweil, MIT Press.1990. "AARON", THE UNIVERSAL MACHINE,
"The Computability of Art" Conference Proceedings, Pamela McCorduck. McGraw-Hill.1985.
International Congress on the Philosophy of Art. "Computer Graphics - Computer Art" Herbert W.
Lahti, Finland. 1990. Franke, Springer-Verlag, 2nd Edition.1985.
"The Finer Arts," MACHINERY OF THE MIND
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY George Johnson, Times Books.1986.
"The Computer: A Tool for Thought-Experiments"
"Harold Cohen" Catalogue Introduction for Frank Dietrich, FD-THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS.
Whitechapel Gallery Retrospective of Harold July 21987.
Cohen, Bryan Robertson.1965. "Science and Meanings in Art" Pamela McCorduck, "
"Harold Cohen" Catalogue Introduction for WHOLE EARTH REVIEW" #55, Summer 1987.
Whitechapel Gallery Retrospective of Harold "Artificial Intelligence: An Apercu" Pamela McCorduck,
Cohen, John Richardson.1965. DAEDELUS.Winter 1988.
"Harold Cohen" Catalogue Introduction for Venice "Artificial Intelligence: An Apercu" Pamela McCorduck,
Biennale, David Thompson.1966. "The Technologicallmagination"1989.
"Contemporary British Painting" Catalogue Introduc "DIGITAL VISIONS - COMPUTERS AND ART"
tion for Stuyvesant Foundation Exhibition, Cynthia Goodman, Abrams.1987.
Alan Bowness.1967. "Die Muse in der Steckdose" David Galloway,
"PRIVATE VIEW" John Russell, Bryan Robertson, KUNSTFORUM - ASTHETIK DES
IMMATERIELLEN. Nov-Dec 1988.
"An Artwork That Creates Art" ART OF OUR
CENTURY, Jean-Louis Ferrier, Editor,
Prentice Hall Editions.1989.
"THE CREATIVE MIND, MYTHS AND MECHANISMS"
Margaret A. Boden, Weidenfeld and
Nicholson.1990.
"THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES"
Raymond Kurzweil, MIT
Press.1990.
"Can Computers Create?" Pamela
McCorduck, ART &
ANTIQUES.April 1991.
"AARON'S CODE: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelli
gence and the Work of Harold
Cohen" Pamela McCorduck,
Freeman.1991.
"Digital Mantras" Steven R. Holtzman, MIT
Press, 1994.
~
The Follow signs displaying a giant milk bottle, our
landmark, to Museum Wharf.
Computer By Subway: Take the Red line to South Station. Walk
Museum across the Congress Street Bridge.

By Car:
From North Take the Expressway (1-93) south to exit
23, High & Congress Streets. Make the first left onto
Congress Street and stay over to the right. Go
through two lights and over the Congress Street
Bridge. The Museum is on the left at the foot of the
bridge.
From South Take the Expressway (1-93) north to
Downtown, Massachusetts Turnpike/Chinatown Exit.
Bear left to sign marked Downtown Boston. At the
end of the ramp, take a right on Kneeland Street to
South Station. Make a left onto Atlantic Avenue. Go
through two lights, make a right on Congress Street
and across over the bridge. The Museum is on the
left at the foot of the bridge.
From West Massachusetts Turnpike (1-90) east to
Downtown Boston, South Station Exit. Go through
three lights onto Congress Street, turn right, and
across the bridge. The Museum is on the left at the
foot of the bridge.

Parking is available on Congress Street and Northern

Avenue.

Photographs & design by Becky Cohen © • Best Black & White (&color) • Encinitas, California 92024 • 619 / 942-7386 (tel) • 619 / 942-9602 (fax)
Digital Imaging and Printing by UCSD Graphics, San Diego