AARON

From the studio to the AI laboratory

AARON was a developing artistic project rather than a fixed product launched on one date. The Whitney traces its conception to Cohen’s work at the University of California, San Diego, in the late 1960s, followed by development at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1973–75. Conception, naming and later implementations belong to different moments.

Section sources: Harold Cohen: AARON — Art & Artists · Harold Cohen: AARON

Encoding decisions about drawing

The program had to deal with closed contours, figure and ground, and the distribution of objects. The Whitney describes rules such as working from foreground to background, combined with random events that generate lines and shapes. The drawing emerges through successive decisions rather than the tracing of a stored finished picture.

Section sources: Harold Cohen: AARON — Art & Artists

A limitation Cohen described in 1982

In How to Make a Drawing, Cohen explains that the AARON he is discussing remembers a drawing in progress but does not accumulate experience from completed drawings. He also recalls colouring its line drawings himself and understanding his role as somewhere between teacher and collaborator. This is an account of a particular developmental stage, not a specification for every subsequent version.

Section sources: How to Make a Drawing

Drawings, devices and the running program

The 2024 Whitney exhibition brought together works on paper, screen-based software and working plotters. An Untitled work from 1982 is catalogued as watercolour and plotter pen on paper. The active machines were modern re-creations, and some early code was reconstructed from notebooks in Python. Installation photographs document that later presentation, not an untouched 1970s apparatus.

Section sources: Harold Cohen: AARON · Harold Cohen: AARON — Art & Artists

Where does authorship reside?

Editorial interpretation: AARON invites attention to who defines the system’s capacities and revises them. Writing rules, selecting outputs, applying colour and deciding how to exhibit the work locate creative labour at different stages. This makes authorship a more specific question, without settling permission or remuneration disputes surrounding contemporary large-scale training datasets.

Section sources: How to Make a Drawing · Harold Cohen: AARON

Sources for this account

Based on the artist’s account and museum documentation. AARON code was not executed or audited; descriptions from 1982 retain their historical scope. The account and translation are AI-assisted, pending independent human review. Section references identify evidence without claiming independent verification of every historical statement.

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