Despite being included in all the key exhibition of new British art in the 1960s – including the 1966 Venice Biennale as part of the show Five Young British Artists – Harold Cohen remains less well-known than many of his contemporaries.
In part this could be due to his long parallel career in academia at UC San Diego, which began in the late 60s, but it could also be proof that it is possible – just sometimes – to be too far ahead of the curve for your own good, for Cohen has been mapping the worlds of computers and artificial intelligence since the former were a recent invention and the latter didn’t really exist.
Indeed, Cohen’s experiments in fully computer generated art in the 70s and 80s can be seen as crucial early enquiries into AI. His creation of AARON, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously, puts Cohen’s art in a space that is only just being occupied today – although today’s artist programmers seem intent in making their avatars paint figuratively, rather than ask them to evoke something of their own electric dreams.
