Artificial Genius DiscoverMagazine.com

Harold Cohen was already an acclaimed artist when he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale back in 1966, and his work subsequently appeared in top-ranked galleries and museums around the world. So in 1969, when he began dabbling in computers, his intent was simply for the machines to help him create his drawings and paintings. I thought of designing a program as a kind of assistant, he recalls. I was to think up the heavenly paradigm and it was to do the earthly instantiation. But as Cohen found himself devoting less and less time and energy to his own paintings, his computerized alter ego, dubbed Aaron, began to take on a career of its own. In 1983, Aaron took up a pencil in its robotic hand and tirelessly produced drawing after drawing for an audience of captivated visitors to the Tate Gallery in London. It didn't matter to them that Cohen had to add color to the drawings with his own hand; many an onlooker walked out with one of the new drawings tucked under his arm. By last year, when the Computer Museum in Boston devoted an entire exhibit to Cohen's stepchild, Aaron had mastered paintbrush and palette and, once Cohen set up the apparatus, produced whole paintings, many of them quite pleasant to look at. Cohen's success with his computer program raises the question: Who is the creator of these paintings? The answer is by no means clear. Perhaps the creative intelligence is Cohen's because, after all, Aaron merely does what he programs it to do.