MANIFESTO

#64

MUSE TWENTY FANZINE

The Creativity Code

2024.02.02

Text by Francesca Fontanesi

Convincingly autonomous or not, AARON has been the tangible demonstration of a still abstract concept. At the Whitney Museum in New York, a comprehensive analysis of Harold Cohen and AARON’s journey in the evolution of creative artificial intelligence will be exhibited, exploring the birth, development, and impact of AI-based generative art, and everything that happens when software and programmer intertwine in an artistic dialogue.

Harold Cohen: AARON
Whitney Museum, New York
February 2024 – May 2024

 

Can the result of a reciprocal dialogue between a program and a programmer be considered art? Harold Cohen taught us that the answer is yes. Born in 1928 in London, Cohen conceived an artificial intelligence program within his artistic nucleus at the University of California in San Diego in the late 1960s. From 1973 to 1975, he continued developing the project at Stanford‘s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, naming it AARON, inspired by the biblical character Aaron, spokesperson and mediator for Moses. In various phases of this project, Cohen drew inspiration from children’s drawing processes, which commence with the connection of shapes and lines before the complete representation of objects or people. However, a visit in 1973 to Chalfant Valley, California, further influenced his approach. The petroglyphs in Mono County provided insights to delve into studies on linguistic codes, symbols, and how they can be translated into images. Cohen aimed to transform AARON into a tool capable of exploring the nature of artistic representation, leveraging his experience as a painter and possessing concrete knowledge of key academic principles – color, line, composition, form, and dimension. For instance, he taught AARON to start drawing in the foreground before transitioning to the background and embedded many of his external world and specific object knowledge into its code, making them accessible in the software’s long-term memory. The exhibition Harold Cohen: AARON at the Whitney Museum of New York examines the evolution of the first AI-based artistic creation program, exploring its foundational phases and providing a broad historical perspective on current artificial intelligence tools.

Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT, 2001. Screenshot. Artificial intelligence software.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Harold Cohen Trust.
Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT, 2001. Screenshot. Artificial intelligence software.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Harold Cohen Trust.
Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT, 2001. Screenshot. Artificial intelligence software.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Harold Cohen Trust.

“What makes AARON so remarkable is that Cohen tried to encode the artistic process and sensibility itself, creating an AI with knowledge of the world that tries to represent it in ever-new freehand line drawings and paintings.”

– Christiane Paul

Aaron was clearly not a tool in an orthodox sense. It was closer to being a sort of assistant, but not an assistant which could learn what I wanted done by looking at what I did myself, the way any of Rubens’ assistants could see perfectly well for themselves what a Rubens painting was supposed to look like.

 

 

Fundamentally different from the processes of currently popular AI software, AARON is a procedural system that mimics human decision-making to create images. Contemporary creation tools rely on algorithms that establish associations between images and textual descriptions and, based on user inputs, generate outputs constructed from extensive datasets of pre-existing images. In contrast, AARON determines its outputs through rules and instructions to complete tasks based on the knowledge encoded in its memory. Evolving through different phases, the software’s proficiency in these knowledge areas became the criterion for measuring success in realizing the program’s drawings, which were primarily abstract in the early experimental years. AARON could only produce monochromatic line drawings initially, and Cohen manually added color to black-and-white drawings with a pen plotter, generating images on paper. As AARON‘s capabilities advanced, Cohen’s code focused on figures, often pairing them with plants or flowers in compositions. Simultaneously, the challenge lay in the blindness of the computerized system: while human cognitive systems develop by engaging with an external reality, AARON‘s cognitive system had to learn to see in the dark.

HAROLD COHEN, AARON KCAT, 2001. SCREENSHOT. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; © HAROLD COHEN TRUST.

The transition of AARON from abstraction to figuration towards the end of the 1980s represented both a technical and conceptual shift, requiring the software to have a different and more tangible understanding of the external world to be able to create characters and surrounding scenes that are humanly recognizable. Cohen’s evolving code enhanced AARON‘s capabilities by adopting strategies from painters‘ processes, pushing the program to develop fundamental structures for representing humans. An example of this visible output is the painting Untitled, Bathers Series (1986), which alludes to one of the most famous works by Paul Cézanne. Featuring rocks and flowers alongside other abstracted figures that begin to vaguely approach more traditional human forms, the works of this phase actually reveal a connection with the later variations of the AARON software from the 2000s, which managed to depict various types of layered foliage and plant life: without stored descriptions regarding floral species, it succeeded in painting multiple specimens of plants based solely on rules regarding their dimensions, branching levels, and leaf formation processes. In the 1990s, Cohen finally managed to teach AARON to apply colors autonomously. After stating, AARON drew so much better than [I] did, Cohen definitively abandoned his individual practice.

HAROLD COHEN, AARON KCAT, 2001. SCREENSHOT. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; © HAROLD COHEN TRUST

“We are in the process of coming to terms with the fact that intelligence no longer means, uniquely, human intelligence”.

– Harold Cohen

HAROLD COHEN, AARON KCAT, 2001. SCREENSHOT. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; © HAROLD COHEN TRUST.
HAROLD COHEN, AARON GIJON, 2007. SCREENSHOT. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE. WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; © HAROLD COHEN TRUST.

NEWS

KAWS: HOLIDAY

2024.11.25

Exploring the creative dialogue and cultural significances of KAWS and Audemars Piguet.

NIKKI MALOOF

AROUND THE CLOCK

2024.11.22

Beauty in everyday life

 

The mundane, the horrors, and everything in between, Maloof captures the everyday in her maximalist artworks.

THE SEER, THE SEEN

2024.11.21

Confronting his dual cultural upbringing, Sang Woo Kim invites us to pause, look, and question not just what we see, but how and why we see it.

THE 80S: PHOTOGRAPHING BRITAIN

2024.11.20

Recording a changing Britain and capturing social change. Tate Britain explores the medium of photography and how it became a tool for social representation, cultural celebration, and artistic expression throughout the ‘80s.

art

MARIO MERZ

2024.11.12

Qualcosa che toglie il peso che mantiene l’assurdità e la leggerezza della favola

 

Fondazione Merz invites us into a space where the weight of reality dissolves, leaving only the raw essence of the world.