Harold Cohen

"Harold Cohen (1928 - ) studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, and taught there for several years before joining the Visual Arts Department in 1968. His work as a painter has been exhibited widely both in galleries and in major museums. During the 1960s he represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale, Documenta 3, the Paris Biennale, the Carnegie International and many other important international shows. He exhibited regularly at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London and the Alan Stone Gallery in New York.
After moving to San Diego, Cohen became interested in computer programming and particularly in the field of artificial intelligence. On the basis of his early research he was invited, in 1971, to spend two years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Stanford University as a Guest Scholar. Much of his work since that time has been concerned with building a machine-based simulation of the cognitive processes underlying the human act of drawing. The resulting ongoing program, AARON, has by now been seen producing original ""freehand"" drawings in museums and science centers in the US, Europe and Japan: the Los Angeles County Museum, Documenta-6, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Gallery in London and the IBM Gallery in New York among others. He has also exhibited in a number of science centers, including the Ontario Science Center, Pittsburgh's Buhl Center, the Science Museum in Boston and the California Museum of Science and Technology. He has a permanent exhibit in the Computer Museum in Boston, and he represented the US in the Japan World Fair in Tsukuba in 1985.
Away from painting in the early '70's, Cohen marked his return with a 100-foot painting for the San Francisco Museum show in 1979. Since then he has executed a number of murals from AARON's drawings: one for the Capitol Children's Museum in Washington, DC, three for the Digital Equipment Corporation, a mosaic mural for the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and one each for the Buhl Science Center and the Ontario Science Center. His recent work has extended AARON's capabilities from drawing to painting; the first of his painting machines was used in an exhibition at the Computer Museum in Boston in 1995."
[Source: unknown and currently being researched]