By the late 1960s, abstract painter Harold Cohen had represented Britain at important festivals with his oil paintings and was seeking a new challenge. "Maybe there are more interesting things going on outside my studio than inside it," he thought. Cohen turned from the canvas (画布) to the screen, using computers to find new ways of creating art. In the late 1960s, he created a program that he named Aaron. It was the first artificial intelligence software in the world of fine art, and Cohen first presented Aaron in 1974 at the University of California, Berkeley. Aaron's work has since graced museums from the Tate Gallery in London to the Sand Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Now, with AI dominating the headlines, a new exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, "Harold Cohen: Aaron," running through June 2024, draws attention to Cohen's pioneering work. The Whitney is offering something deeper than most previous Aaron exhibits: a real-time experience, in which visitors can watch the software produce art.
Cohen seeded Aaron with all sorts of knowledge: about basic objects, physics, and fundamental techniques of drawing. Aaron uses this knowledge to follow instructions, complete tasks, and make decisions like human beings — a very different approach from today's generative AI art programs, which don't draw from scratch (从头开始) but rather rely on databases of images. Versions of Aaron still generate output, but anything done after Cohen's death in 2016 is not considered genuine.
The Whitney is showcasing two versions of Cohen's software, along with the art that each produced before Cohen died. The 2001 version, Aaron KCAT, generates images of figures and plants and projects them onto a wall more than ten feet high, while the 2007 version produces jungle-like scenes. The software will also create art physically, on paper, for the first time since the 1990s. "It is absolutely thrilling," said Christiane Paul, the museum's director of digital art, "to have one of those remarkable treasures of digital art in the collection."
