With an exhibition curated by Christiane Paul, the Whitney Museum of American Art traces the evolution of AARON, the first artificial intelligence programme, which was developed in the late 1960s by Harold Cohen to add creativity to his painting practice and to help stimulate experimental knowledge. The works in the exhibition are carefully selected and highlight, in a scientific manner, key moments from this man-machine dialogue. The curatorial approach is chronological, covering the transition from analogue to digital, the transition from abstraction to figuration in the mid-1980s, together with everything that these transitions entailed in both technical and conceptual terms.
The Whitney Museum is the only museum to have versions of the AARON software in its collection that cover the different periods of this project’s development, thus allowing us to retrace the different stages of its evolution and the way this dialogue has gradually evolved.
Harold Cohen established a real dialogue with the software. He began by providing AARON with rules and knowledge regarding the basic principles of colour, form, composition and dimension – the basis of his training as a painter. This dialogue has developed gradually, over time . From an initial reflection on drawing and colour through analogue rules established in the 1960s, when the early 1970s arrived, there was the opportunity and the right context in which the AARON software could be developed at Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab.
From then on, the journey continued in stages, each one an attempt (always successful, sometimes overly so) to push the limits of artificial intelligence. At a certain point, Cohen realised that the machine was capable of doing things he previously could possibly conceive of. When AARON learnt to colour the drawings, which had previously been completed by hand by the artist, a moment of crisis ensued. This was not the result of not having anything to do, but rather that the collaboration between man and machine had come to a halt. “I felt that my dialogue with the programme, the very root of our creativity, had been abruptly terminated,” Cohen said in a 2010 lecture at the Orcas Centre.
That is why the machine, central to the exhibition at the Whitney, has been brought back to life, encouraging visitors who can participate in the process of making the works, also through online streaming on the site at certain times of the day. Software “as a central creative force behind the artwork.” But not only this. A whole series of ephemera, such as notebooks and personal drawings, is also on display which are part of the moment of design and reflection.
In addition to celebrating an artist recognised as a pioneer of digital art, the exhibition goes to the heart of this man-machine dialogue, penetrating the mechanisms of the process by marking out the stages, and helping visitors reflect on their relationship with modern artificial intelligence technologies, using the latest programmes such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
“Harold Cohen’s AARON has iconic status in digital art history, but the recent rise of AI artmaking tools has made it even more relevant. Cohen’s software provides us with a different perspective on image making with AI,” says Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. “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. Watching AARON’s creations drawn live as they were half a century ago will be a unique experience for viewers.”
In recent years, particularly those coinciding with the pandemic crisis and the shift of economic and cultural interests now to be found online, terms such as Digital Art have been particularly inflated, confused with digital tools such as NFT certificates, or with graphic and design projects. This has meant obscuring much of the experimentation that has characterised the history of research in these fields for more than twenty years. These actions facilitating knowledge and awareness through exhibitions are particularly important. Alongside the Whitney, the London-based Gazelli Art House Gallery has also made a move, by proposing for the exhibition “Refractoring (1966-74)”, a carefully selected number of Cohen’s works, tracing key moments of the transition between 1966 and 1974 – a crucial moment in the artist’s work, including the ones that marked the transition to the software, and in a moment of great international recognition that did not halt his creative drive “that arises when the individual starts to question the unquestioned assumptions of his field and to act out of the scenarios that present themselves as a result” (Cohen, Driving the Creative Machine, lecture at Orcas Center, 2010).
In addition to a specific reflection on the man-machine relationship, these two exhibitions retrace part of this history and make it comprehensible by bringing visitors closer to the process in all its vitality. The correlated events, some of which are available online, the documents produced and the catalogue with contributions from leading scholars that was presented at the Gazelli Art House on 9 May, will follow the end of the exhibitions. For museums and galleries, this is an important aspect of their work to disseminate knowledge and curate exhibitions. All of this also makes us reflect on curating exhibition, with the focus on ensuring that content is made available and accessible to visitors, to the extent of a museum and a gallery, respectively.
Harold Cohen, AARON, a cura di Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum of American Art, fino al 19 maggio 2024
images: (cover 1-2) Installation view of Harold Cohen: AARON, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 3 – May 19, 2024 (3) Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT, 2001 (4) Installation view of Harold Cohen: AARON, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 3 – May 19, 2024 (5) Harold Cohen, AARON Gijon, 2001 (6) Exhibition view: Harold Cohen, Refactoring (1966-74), Gazelli Art House, London (8 March–11 May 2024). Courtesy Gazelli Art House, London.
