The Whitney Museum of American Art celebrates the final weeks of Harold Cohen: AARON.
This exhibition explores the foundational stages of artificial intelligence and its place in art history through the lens of AARON, which was developed in the late 1960s by artist Harold Cohen. AARON is the first AI software for artmaking and one of the longest-running contemporary art projects.
A pioneer in computer-based art, Harold Cohen was fascinated by the computer’s power and potential as an artmaking tool.
AARON’s functionality is based on knowledge distilled into rules coded by the artist, which differs from today’s AI image creation tools, like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, that generate their output from existing images on the basis of a user’s text prompts.
This exhibition centers on AARON, the earliest artificial intelligence software for artmaking and one of the longest-running contemporary art projects. Conceived in the late 1960s by Harold Cohen at the University of California San Diego, AARON was further developed until his death in 2016. AARON’s various manifestations include software that drives plotting and painting machines and software to display imagery on monitors or projectors.
The first and only museum to collect versions of the AARON software from different time periods, the Whitney will showcase artworks produced by AARON and highlight its drawing process live in the galleries for the first time since the 1990s.
Harold Cohen: AARON is on view through Sunday, May 19 at The Whitney Museum of American Art located at 99 Gansevoort Street in New York City.
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