Feral File posthumously releases Harold Cohen / AARON drawings

2024

Artists: Harold Cohen, Casey Reas (Feral File founder), Becky Cohen (estate executor) · Year: 2024 · Medium: NFT release of historical AI-generated drawings · Substrate: Reproductions of AARON drawings 1973-2016, released as NFTs through Feral File · Place: Online (Feral File platform) · Institution: Feral File Feral File released the first authorized NFT collection of Harold Cohen's AARON drawings in 2024, in collaboration with the Cohen estate. The release made available digital editions of selected drawings from across AARON's forty-three-year operation (1973-2016), with the cooperation of Cohen's widow Becky Cohen (estate executor) and Casey Reas (Feral File founder, longtime AARON-tradition continuator). The collection's specific significance is that it brought one of the foundational bodies of AI-generated art into the same NFT-distribution context that had been substantially-newer artists' primary venue. AARON had been operating from 1973 through Cohen's death in 2016 — the longest sustained AI-art project in history — but Cohen had distributed work primarily through traditional gallery and museum channels rather than digital-edition platforms. The 2024 release brought the AARON archive into direct dialogue with the contemporary AI-art generation, with proceeds supporting both the Cohen estate's archival work and broader AARON-tradition educational programming. The release was substantively important for institutional AI-art history — it positioned AARON in the canonical AI-art lineage that the post-2018 GAN generation had been retrospectively building. Several of the contemporary AI-art artists who participated in adjacent Feral File programming during 2024 (Robbie Barrat, Holly Herndon, Mario Klingemann) explicitly cited AARON as a foundational reference; the Cohen-estate release made the historical work directly available to that audience. What this matters for in the archive is the specific case of historical AI-art practice being institutionally legitimized through contemporary platform infrastructure. The 2018 Obvious/Belamy sale had been controversial substantially because it was framed as the first AI artwork; the 2024 Cohen release substantively corrected that framing by making the actual fifty-year history of AI-generated artwork commercially-accessible. Becky Cohen has continued to work with Feral File and other contemporary platforms on subsequent AARON-related releases. The Computer History Museum holds the complete AARON program archive; selected runtime captures are now part of the Feral File-released collection. Lore Casey Reas had been a substantial AARON-aware figure in his own practice for over two decades; his Process series (2004 onward) was substantively in dialogue with Cohen's earlier procedural-drawing work, and Reas had been in correspondence with Cohen during the 2010s. The Feral File release was negotiated over 2022-24 between Reas and Becky Cohen, with substantial input from the Computer History Museum (which holds the AARON program archive). The release itself involved running selected vintage AARON code captures, producing high-resolution digital captures, and publishing them as numbered NFT editions through Feral File's curated-release infrastructure. Sales proceeds were directed to a combination of the Cohen estate, archival preservation work at the Computer History Museum, and an emerging-AI-artist scholarship fund Becky Cohen has been building. Sources • Feral File — feralfile.com (Cohen / AARON release documentation). • Computer History Museum — Harold Cohen / AARON archive.