Allow me, AARON: the first AI for making art

Like child, like computer: In the 1960s, British artist Harold Cohen observed how children typically made drawings and subsequently developed the first computer-controlled drawing machine. Cohen, an accomplished painter and programmer, fed the software with composition rules, drawing strategies and other equipment. From its beginnings in 1968 until Cohen's death in 2016, AARON was constantly developed further. The abstract images became increasingly complex, and in the 1980s, Cohen succeeded in changing the program so that it produced figurative images. From the early 1990s, the AI was able to paint color images. The Whitney Museum of American Art is the only museum that collects different versions of the AARON software. The exhibition Harold Cohen: AARON is a fascinating exhibition about the skills of the first digital artist and the history of AI art. It is interesting to compare it with current programs such as DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, which do not produce their own images, but instead use them as a source of inspiration.

Harold Cohen (1928-2016) was not only a visionary, but also a great artist: in 1966 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, and before that he took part in documenta III (1964) and the Tokyo Biennale in 1963. In 1968 he accepted a professorship in the Visual Arts Department at the University of San Diego in California, where he taught for almost 30 years. In the same year, he began work on AARON, which has borne this name since 1973. The name refers to the biblical figure, a brother of Moses and the first high priest of the Israelites chosen by God. Aaron later made the Golden Calf when it seemed uncertain that Moses would return from Mount Sinai. Cohen continued to develop AARON without interruption. In 2014, he received the ACMSIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for his lifetime achievement in the field of digital art.