Untitled (early plotter study)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
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Harold Cohen

1972

Plotter Drawing

40"×30"
Red/brown fiber-tip pen on kraft or butcher paper
Signed "Harold Cohen 72"

Description

Harold Cohen’s untitled plotter study from 1972 was produced using the earliest version of the pioneering art-making software that a year later would be christened AARON.

Plotted on kraft paper, this study may have been a test run for the works exhibited in January 1972 in “Three Behaviors for the Partitioning of Space” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That was also the first time Cohen demonstrated his invention in action at a museum.

Cohen had started learning to program only four years earlier, and presented a prototype for “a computer-controlled drawing machine” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Las Vegas in 1971. It was a symbolic AI system, which based its decisions on a set of rules and parameters defined by the artist and then fed its instructions to a drawing machine (in this case, a flatbed plotter).

In this initial version, the rules were simple: to produce a series of monochromatic lines that never form a closed space. Cohen referred to the resulting images as “mazes.” In a 1995 interview, he described how the project emerged from an attempt “to answer a very fundamental question for myself: what are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks on a flat surface functions as an image[?]”