About
British-American artist and computer scientist (1928–2016), creator of AARON — the first program ever written to autonomously make original visual art. Trained as a painter at the Slade in London and a representative of Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale, Cohen pivoted in 1968 after a residency at Stanford and spent the next fifty years building and refining AARON in collaboration with computer scientists at UCSD, where he directed the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. Across half a century the program evolved from line-following pen-plotter drawings to fully realised colour painting machines exhibited at the Whitney, SFMOMA, the Tate and the Brooklyn Museum. After Cohen's death the Harold Cohen Trust has been issuing AARON-based NFT and physical/digital provenance projects in partnership with Fellowship, Verisart and Gazelli Art House — most recently AARON at Tsukuba '85 (2025), a 100-edition claim-deed token series tied to the historic plotter drawings AARON produced live at the 1985 Tsukuba World's Fair.