Harold Cohen's AI Pioneer AARON Retrospective at Whitney Museum

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is hosting 'Harold Cohen: AARON', a retrospective of the pioneering AI artist who developed the first software-alter ego capable of producing images using artificial intelligence. Curated by Christiane Paul and David Lisbon, the exhibition traces the evolution of Cohen's collaboration with AARON from the early 1970s to the 2010s. Cohen, born in London in 1928, established himself as a painter in the 1960s before moving to the US to teach at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). There he conceived AARON, which was further developed at Stanford University's AI lab and first released in 1973. Unlike contemporary text-to-image systems that remix existing datasets, AARON was programmed to mimic human creative decision-making, drawing inspiration from children's drawing processes and prehistoric petroglyphs in California's Chalfant Valley. The software evolved from abstract forms in the 1970s to figurative representations of humans and flowers in the 1980s. The exhibition runs until May 19, 2024, at the Whitney Museum located at 99 Gansevoort St.