Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
bilities of computers, not only those who visited the exhibition during its
11-week run but also those who read the many articles about the various
exhibitors and their works that appeared in newspapers and magazines
on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result there was a significant increase
of activity in the field, which benefited as much from artists who took up
an interest in computing as it did from those who arrived in the opposite
direction. For several years much of the published output of computer
artists was highly mathematical in nature, for example creations based
on fractals or mathematical curves, but then came Harold Cohen and he
changed everything.
AARON
AARON exists; it generates objects that hold their own more than
adequately, in human terms, in any gathering of similar, but human-
produced, objects, and it does so with a stylistic consistency that re-
veals an identity as clearly as any human artist's does. It does these
things, moreover, without my own intervention. I do not believe
that AARON constitutes an existence proof of the power of ma-
chines to think, or to be creative, or to be self-aware, to display any
of those attributes coined specifically to explain something about
ourselves. It constitutes an existence proof of the power of ma-
chines to do some of the things we had assumed required thought,
and which we still suppose would require thought, and creativity,
and self-awareness, of a human being.
If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly, and in what
ways, other than its origin, does it differ from the “real thing?” If it
is not thinking, what exactly is it doing? [10]
AARON is a program created by the English abstract artist Harold Co-
hen, who studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London
and taught there for several years, developing an international reputation
as an artist before moving to California in 1968. Cohen's development
of AARON started when he was a visiting scholar at Stanford Univer-
sity's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1973, and the work has been
ongoing ever since. Cohen and AARON have had exhibitions at the Tate
Gallery in London—the leading modern art museum in Britain—and in
the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and many more of the world's major
art spaces.
