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British

1928 —2016

Harold Cohen was a British artist who moved from abstract painting into computer art, becoming one of the earliest figures to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence. Beginning in the 1970s, he developed AARON, a software program designed to generate drawings autonomously, laying the groundwork for decades of collaboration between artist and machine.

Full Bio

Harold Cohen was born in London on May 1, 1928, into a Polish-Russian Jewish family. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1948 to 1952 and later returned as a faculty member. In 1952, he received the Abbey Travelling Scholarship, which allowed him to study in Italy and expand his artistic practice. While still a student, Cohen held his first solo exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Gallery in 1951. Between 1959 and 1961, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, during which he exhibited at Allan Stone Gallery in New York. He was an accomplished abstract painter and designer of textiles and furniture, with a career marked by major exhibitions including representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and participating in international shows such as Documenta and the Paris Biennale.

In 1968, Cohen accepted a visiting professorship at the University of California, San Diego. There, a graduate student in the music department introduced him to programming, opening up a new direction in his practice. Despite having no background in computing, Cohen taught himself FORTRAN and began to think seriously about what it would mean for a machine to make art. In 1971, he was invited to Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he started developing a software program designed to generate drawings autonomously. He named the program AARON, drawing on the biblical figure who spoke for Moses. The reference brings up questions about authorship, agency, and what it means for a machine to act as the artist’s voice. Cohen saw AARON as a collaborator and spent decades refining the program. He built custom plotters and painting machines that followed AARON’s instructions, creating line drawings with pens and adding color with brushes. Over time, AARON’s outputs expanded to include screen-based visuals and large-scale projections. The project became his life’s work, offering a way to explore how artistic knowledge could be translated into code and challenging assumptions about creativity and control in the process.

Throughout his career, Cohen’s work was recognized and exhibited at leading institutions such as the Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His exhibitions, both solo and group, highlighted his pioneering role at the crossroads of art and technology. After retiring from academia in 1994, Cohen continued to develop AARON and produce new artwork from his studio in Encinitas, California. At the heart of his practice was the conviction that creativity is not the product of a single artist or machine but a dynamic dialogue between himself and AARON. This ongoing collaboration between human intuition and programmed logic challenged traditional ideas of authorship and revealed new possibilities for partnership in artistic creation. In recognition of his lifelong dedication, Cohen received the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art in 2014. Cohen passed away in California in 2016.