AARON Tsukuba 6

These plotter works were produced by Harold Cohen’s art-making software AARON in front of live audiences at exhibitions around the world—a testament to the project’s international reach and appeal at the time.

One drawing is from an exhibition in January–March 1983 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In earlier presentations, Cohen had used a robotic “turtle” to execute AARON’s drawings but found they were too distracting for viewers so he decided to build custom plotters fitted with a black pen. Four machines churned out drawings on 22-by-30-in. sheets of paper that visitors could buy for $10 each.

Later that year four machines were again installed at the Tate Gallery in London, where the drawings (an estimated 4,000 in total, taking around 20 minutes each) could be purchased for £10.50. In the Evening Standard, a reviewer described the experience of watching a machine execute one of AARON’s drawings: “Sometimes its point descends and remains on the paper for quite a while, drawing a sequence of confident lines. But then its fluent motion begins to grow jerky… It appears, uncannily, to possess a mind of its own.”

The collection also includes a drawing that is one of more than 7,000 made at Expo 1985, a world’s fair in Tsukuba in Japan. Cohen stayed home in California. This may be why, in contrast to his earlier plotter drawings which were either unsigned or bore his own signature, the work is signed “AARON.”