Untitled (numbers)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Harold Cohen

1972

Plotter Drawing

40"x30"
Red/orange fiber-tip pen on paper
Signed "HC-72"

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Description

Harold Cohen’s Numbers is an unusual work from the early phase of the artist’s experiments with artificial intelligence. Cohen had started programming four years earlier and in 1971 took up a post as visiting scholar in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford. It was there that he began developing the first version of AARON, the art-making software, which he debuted in 1973.

The series to which this plotter drawing, executed in reddish-orange fibertip pen is unknown. It appears that Cohen was experimenting with different parameters according to which the program would make decisions about what to draw—in this case, to create a series of marks forming numerical digits.