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

AARON According to Abrahamic religions, Aaron ''′aharon'', ar, هارون, Hārūn, Greek (Septuagint): Ἀαρών; often called Aaron the priest ()., group="note" ( or ; ''’Ahărōn'') was a prophet, a high priest, and the elder brother of ...

, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously. His work in the intersection of

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

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and art attracted a great deal of attention, leading to exhibitions at many museums, including the

Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

in London, and acquisitions by many others.

Early life

Cohen was born in London, the son of

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

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 at the

Venice Biennial The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

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 or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

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 The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) was an interdisciplinary organized research unit of UCSD in San Diego, California. CRCA provided support for numerous projects that intersect with the fields of New Media Art, Software Studies ...

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 Encinitas (Spanish for "Small Oaks") is a beach city in the North County area of San Diego County, California. Located within Southern California, it is approximately north of San Diego, between Solana Beach and Carlsbad, and about south o ...

, 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 f ...

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 is one of the most prominent women writers of contemporary Japan, with more than a dozen collections of poetry, several works of prose, numerous books of essays, and several major literary prizes to her name. She divides her time between the t ...

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 language, as well as ...

but eventually converted to

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

, 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 (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

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