Harold Cohen — AARON begins painting in color

1988

Artists: Harold Cohen · Year: 1988 · Medium: AARON's color-painting phase — robotic painting machine with Cohen-developed color theory · Substrate: AARON program in Lisp with Cohen's color-theory modules; purpose-built robotic paint-applying machine · Place: La Jolla, California, USA · Institution: University of California, San Diego By 1988, Harold Cohen's program AARON — which had been making figurative drawings autonomously since 1973 — had been taught to paint in color. Cohen spent most of the period from 1988 to about 2001 developing AARON's color-handling capability, writing a color theory from scratch that the program would use to make chromatic decisions, and building a physical painting machine that could apply wet pigment to canvas under AARON's direction. The result, by the mid-1990s, was a program producing complete paintings with figures, foliage, and coherent color composition, realized physically at full canvas scale. This is a harder problem than it sounds. Color decision in painting is notoriously difficult to formalize; most academic color theories (Albers, Itten) describe perception rather than compositional choice. Cohen wrote his own theory — a set of rules for how AARON should handle palette selection, color distribution across a composition, and the relationships between foreground and background colors. The theory was specifically designed to be computable, and Cohen was explicit that he was giving AARON an artistic theory, not the artistic theory. AARON's color paintings were exhibited at major museums through the 1990s — the Tate, the Computer History Museum, SFMOMA, the Ontario Science Centre. The paintings are legibly AARON's: there is a Cohen-AARON style, recognizable across decades, that is neither straightforwardly Cohen nor a pastiche of any human style. Cohen died in 2016. AARON stopped making new work the same day. Lore The AARON color-painting apparatus, which Cohen built and maintained himself in his La Jolla studio, was a wheeled platform with a multi-color paint dispenser controlled by the program. AARON's paintings could take days to physically execute. Cohen hosted visitors for demonstrations regularly; the machine's behavior was often described by visitors as uncanny — pauses, apparent hesitations, deliberations before strokes. Cohen consistently refused to interpret those behaviors anthropomorphically. Sources • McCorduck, Pamela — AARON's Code (W.H. Freeman, 1991) • Cohen, Harold — "Color, Simply" (MIT Press, 2006) • Computer History Museum — AARON archive