Harold Cohen's AARON

AARON is an artistic software program written by Harold Cohen, which creates works of art. These pieces completed both by AARON itself and AARON in collaboration with Harold Cohen, have been great in number, as they have been creating art together since 1973.

Originally designed to created abstract images in black and white using a couple basic construction tools, AARON has evolved over time and its capabilities have grown since its first version. In the 80's and 90's the art became much less abstract, creating representations of rocks, plants, and even people. All the while, working its way up to full interior scenes and colors instead of black and white. This program is reaching towards, what I believe to be a wonderful goal of, creating a program (or even artificial intelligence if you're feeling dramatic) which is capable of creating what we would call art. This goal should be one that remains in the computational art movement, but Harold Cohen feels that AARON and his goal will end with Cohen himself. While unfortunate, I would tend to agree since this project has been a 40 year endeavor by Cohen and it is unlikely anyone will step into those shoes and finish AARON. The idea behind it, though, of creating a machine capable of creating original artwork should not be something lost to the computational art movement.

AARON hopefully will become the launching point for a possibly even more creative program able to stand on par with some of the greatest artists of its time. That would truly be a wondrous thing to behold.