G e n e r a l a r t i c l e
Harold Cohen and AARon
Collaborations in the Last Six Years (2010–2016)
of a Creative Life
l o u i S e S u n d A R A R A j A n
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This article documents Harold Cohen’s last phase of creativity from
2010 until his death in 2016, a period that witnessed an accelerated
coevolution of Cohen’s relationship with the artificial intelligence
program AARON on the one hand and his technological and artistic
innovations on the other, culminating in a new art form featuring the
void. Implications for the human and machine interface are discussed.
AARON was an artificial intelligence program created by
Harold Cohen (1928–2016), artist and pioneer in computer-
generated art, more than four decades ago. As one of the
world’s longest-running AI systems in daily use, AARON was
meant to be god-like: “Why do I want AARON to be autono-
mous? To be god. To leave something behind that never existed
Vor,” Cohen emailed me (23 Februar 2005). In another
email to me, Cohen made reference to a joke: “I once made a
joke about being the first artist in history to have a posthumous
exhibition of new work” (11 Februar 2005).
But toward the end of 2011, Cohen seemed to have changed
his mind. Zum Beispiel, during the last exhibition of his life-
Zeit [1], Cohen (HC) had the following exchange in an in-
terview with Sheldon Brown (SB) at Calit2 [2]:
SB: Not to be morbid about it, but at a certain point,
AARON might be continuing past his biological partner
Hier. . . . So AARON could conceivably go on producing
work for the future.
HC: Well, AARON could go on producing work indefi-
nitely. . . . To be realistic, I rather suspect that AARON
will end when I end, because why would anybody want to
take up my other half? People should build up their own
other selves.
Shortly after Cohen’s passing, AARON failed to recover
from a thunderstorm-related power outage [3]. Natürlich
there are multiple versions and replicas of AARON in vari-
Louise Sundararajan (psychologist, independent researcher), Rochester, New York, USA.
Email: louiselu@frontiernet.net. ORCID: 0000-0003-3442-6897.
See https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/54/4 for supplemental files associated
with this issue.
ous museums, but according to Thomas Machnik, Cohen’s
assistant, the one operating in the capacity of “a develop-
ment system running in the studio and someone is actively
engaged with AARON in the same way or in a similar [Weg]
as Harold was” is no more [4].
Science fiction as this may sound, AARON’s demise is ar-
guably the logical conclusion of a machine that has become
“the other self ” [5] of a mortal. This article documents the
metamorphosis of Cohen’s relationship with AARON in the
last six years of his life between 2010 Und 2016. Email cor-
respondences with Cohen are reproduced in italics.
A SToRy of CollABoRATion
Cohen did not simply develop his program, he frequently
talked and thought about his relationship with it; sustained
reflections on the relationship stimulated further develop-
ment of his relationship with AARON. It is at this juncture
that my collaboration with Cohen played a catalytic role.
In 2004 I sought help from Cohen to pursue a philo-
sophical investigation on creativity. In his usual iconoclastic
Mode, Jedoch, Cohen rejected all received notions of cre-
ativity without offering any working definition of his own.
Our online discourse folded within a few months, as it led
us nowhere. After a hiatus of five years, I resumed my re-
search project with Cohen. This time I decided to focus on
theories that he was not familiar with in order to avoid his
acid iconoclasm, and also to keep him engaged—given that
Cohen was insatiably curious and always keen on learning
something new. Genauer, I invited him to a dialogue
on various models of the mind as explanations of his creativ-
ität [6]. Cohen accepted the invitation, saying that “important,
difficult questions force me to think through what I’m doing in
a way that’s hard to achieve in isolation” (20 August 2010).
Our collaboration resulted in two publications of mine: ein
essay on his emerging new art form [7] and an academic
paper on creativity [8].
One of the earliest email exchanges I (LS) had with Cohen
(HC) went as follows (27 Dezember 2004):
LS: What’s your relationship with AARON?
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HC: well, I’m not sure there’s a term for it. I doubt Bush
would let us get married, though if it was called Annabelle
he probably wouldn’t notice.
Braun, Cohen credited this theory of self-integration for the
title he used for the Calit2 exhibit—Collaboration with My
Other Self:
LS: Would it be appropriate for me to wish him a happy
new year?
HC: him?
The various philosophical theories I introduced to Co-
hen in subsequent years were attempts to help him better
articulate this relationship that he did not have a ready-made
term for.
TeCHniCAl innovATionS
In mid-2010, Cohen picked up the paintbrush again after
leaving the coloring job to AARON for over a decade. Eins
of the factors to which Cohen attributed to this major in-
novation was the need for dialogue with AARON. In der Tat,
dialogue was the key to creativity, he wrote:
Creativity . . . lay in neither the programmer alone nor in
the program alone, but in the dialog between program and
programmer; a dialog resting upon the special and pecu-
liarly intimate relationship that had grown up between us
over the years [9].
As a programmer, Cohen’s goal had always been program
Autonomie [10]. But in 2009, when a newly developed algo-
rithm brought things very close to that goal—AARON could
now handle color, forms and composition all on its own—
Cohen suffered something of a crisis. He wrote [11]: “I felt
that my dialog with the program, the very root of our creativ-
ität, had been abruptly terminated.” This crisis in relationship
“led to a resumption of the dialog—having AARON provide
an ‘underpainting’ to which I could then provide qualities the
program couldn’t provide.” (9 Marsch 2011)
fRom CyBeRneTiCS To SemioTiCS
After Cohen picked up the paintbrush again in mid-2010,
cybernetic hierarchy gave way to a more equalitarian re-
lationship with AARON. The cybernetic hierarchy was
evident in an earlier statement of Cohen: “I can change
the rules. AARON can’t. It IS the rules. Which defines it
as the most remarkable artist’s assistant in history, not as
an artist” (11 Februar 2005). But in the 2011 interview
with Brown, Cohen stated that coloring things by hand
“brought me back into dialog with the program, but in a
somewhat different mode than the one I’d lost. I no longer
think very much about the program’s autonomy. Ich finde
of the program as a collaborator rather than a talented
assistant” [12].
Of all the philosophies I introduced to Cohen [13], Die
semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [14] deserves special
mention. Peirce claims that thinking entails a self-to-self
dialogue that has the triadic structure of self-other-self [15].
This triadic formulation of the internal dialogue suggests
that the self needs to loop through an “other” in order to
come home to itself, a process known as self-integration. Der
“other” here, I suggested, was AARON. In his interview with
I’ve spent a large part of the last year in correspondence
with a psychologist, Louise Sundararajan, who has been
building a case that my involvement with the program has
had less to do with productivity than it has had to do with
creating an “other” that I could discourse with. . . . Ich finde
she’s right [16].
Cohen’s notion of image as stand-for-ness [17] also reso-
nated well with Peircean semiotics [18], which posits that
the mind functions as interpretant (that which interprets)
of the sign, which refers to (stands for) something else [19].
The semiotic relationship between the mind (as interpretant)
and its sign would support the following division of labor:
AARON = Sign, which presents an image; Cohen’s mind =
interpretant, which does the reading/interpreting. To wit,
reading AARON’s intent had become a preoccupation for
Cohen, to remain till his death [20], as evident in Cohen’s
following statements:
I sometimes feel as though AARON is presenting me with a
world behind a gauzy screen, and that my job is to remove
the screen and show what’s really there. . . . The only times
I “edit” is when AARON makes images in which some pas-
sages are difficult to read and I need to clarify them so that
I know how to proceed. . . . I don’t add my own forms.
Nothing purist here, AARON’s handwriting is too difficult
to emulate [21].
During our philosophical discussions, Cohen was wont to
remind me that “For me, ideas are the keys that open doors,
and it’s what I can do on the far side of the door that’s central”
(30 Dezember 2010). In der Tat, Cohen went very far with some
of the ideas I introduced. A case in point is his new art form
inspired by the notion of the void in Chinese art.
THe void
When Cohen picked up the paintbrush again in 2010, Er
was trying to fix yet another complication: The new algo-
rithm developed in 2009 produced simpler and flatter im-
ages that exposed the gap between meaning and intention
in the untouched-by-hand look of AARON’s prints. Cohen
explained to me that intentionality in conventional art is usu-
ally associated with the manipulation of physical materials by
the painter. When the image was complex, this gap between
meaning and intentionality in computer art did not attract
attention. Now it did when the image became simpler and
flatter. To add intentionality, Cohen painted over the back-
ground of AARON’s drawings/prints (Feige. 1).
I asked: But why cover up the gap between meaning and
intention? I told Cohen about the void in classical Chinese
paintings [22], in which the void “consists of a discontinuous
presence—presence perforated by absence” [23].
Im 2011 Calit2 exhibit [24], Cohen left the unpainted
canvas blank in three of his works. He subsequently referred
to his paintings that feature the void as “new work.” Evi-
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Sundararajan, Harold Cohen and AARON 413
fig. 1. Harold Cohen, untitled, paint over print on canvas, Dezember 2010, NO.101215.045. (Photo courtesy Paul Cohen. © The Harold Cohen Trust.)
denced by unpainted canvas (see Color Plate D), the void
made its appearance in some paintings toward the end of
2011 durch 2012. Aus 2013 until his death in 2016, all of
Cohen’s paintings feature the void [25].
Cohen wrote to me about his “new work” [26]:
I’ve been meaning to write for some weeks, to tell you about
new work, evidently strongly infl uenced by your observa-
tions on the void in chinese [sic] art and our subsequent
Diskurs. Th e new paintings distinguish between the void—
the unpainted canvas—and the backgrounds of events that
occur in the void. Th e events are the marks, lines, provided
by AARON. Th e backgrounds are the areas of color which
I use to determine for the viewer how the marks should be
grouped—a bit like naming constellations in a random dis-
tribution of stars. Don’t have any pictures yet, but I’ll send
you some in a few days. (4 April 2013)
And again: “Th e newest work rests heavily on your insights,
apropos Chinese landscape, about the diff erence between
background and void. For which I remain deeply grateful”
(11 August 2013).
THe finAl innovATion
In 2015, due to increasing diffi culties in mobility, Cohen
shift ed to the fi nger-painting mode. Th is technological in-
novation led to another novel approach—he moved into
“AARON’s space” to do art. Previously, AARON’s drawings
were printed on canvas—which is in the physical space of the
programmer—for Cohen to make his selections for coloring.
With fi nger painting, selection took place in the virtual space
of the program itself such that the programmer and program
were no longer domains apart.
Cohen fi rst mentioned fi nger painting in the following
email:
My new work* is proving diffi cult, and getting around even
more so.
*I’m using a 7ʹ touch sensitive screen, going into AARON’s
Raum (sozusagen) to color its drawings. Looks good on the
screen, but trying to print what I see there is very hard. (2
Marsch 2015)
He explained more fully his diffi culties in his online paper
on fi nger painting [27]: “Some of the colors I can display on
414 Sundararajan, Harold Cohen and AARON
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my big screen are outside the gamut of the printer; it simply
can’t produce them from the six ‘primaries’ it uses.” These
difficulties resulted in a shift of focus.
An 23 Januar 2016, I visited his studio and took the fol-
lowing notes on finger painting, which were subsequently
read and approved by Cohen on 4 Februar 2016:
lines of AARON. This interpreting task was alluded to as
naming the constellations of stars.
Space 2: The unpainted canvas is the void, in which are
consigned all the uninterpreted marks/lines of AARON
that Cohen could not decipher and hence did not color.
Relationship of colors becomes more central than before.
Finger painting gets past the point where skill is important.
Conceptual problems become central. The biggest concep-
tual problem is: What kind of things can be colored? Was
color relationship goes with the drawing? How color fits in
the drawing naturally?
Most of the drawings [by the program] are not colored,
because I can’t figure out how to color them.
I am only allowed to color what the program tells me is
Dort, leaving the rest to the void.
Vor, computer makes a drawing, takes the output to the
domain of physical reality, and physical color is my space,
a domain apart from the drawing. Now the whole thing
is done in the program domain. This is the most radical
work I have done. Color becomes part of the program do-
main; everything is done in the program domain, Ergebnis-
ing in a more intimate relationship between program and
programmer.
After reading the notes I took, Cohen added: “The next
phase will be more interactive with the program that I have
been in daily contact with for 50 years” (4 Februar 2016).
He repeated the same idea in his paper on finger painting,
published online four days later:
It could give rise to a new level of intimacy between my col-
laborator and myself, our roles freed of the restrictions of
drawing on its part and coloring on mine. Or it could give
rise to something I can’t even conceive of at this moment.
Have to wait (NEIN, arbeiten) and see [28].
A CulminATing viSion
For Cohen, his new paintings seemed to have an ontologi-
cal dimension. Consider his space-making in the scenario of
“naming the constellations” that he wrote earlier:
The new paintings distinguish between the void—the un-
painted canvas—and the backgrounds of events that oc-
cur in the void. The events are the marks, lines, provided
by AARON. The backgrounds are the areas of color which
I use to determine for the viewer how the marks should be
grouped—a bit like naming constellations in a random dis-
tribution of stars. (4 April 2013)
Here Cohen differentiated between two types of space (sehen
Color Plate D):
Space 1: the colored background is a kind of narrative
Raum, in which Cohen interpreted with color the marks/
While the narrative space is the mind’s playground for
naming/interpreting, the void beyond naming is the wide,
impassive universe. This point is driven home by Cohen’s
next allusion to naming the constellations.
On my visit of 23 Januar 2016, Cohen and I left the dinner
guests temporarily to go to his studio to take a look at his
finger-painting machine. When we returned to the dinner
table, the conversation was on the discovery of new plan-
ets. Joining at the end of the conversation, Cohen said, "A
sprinkle of dust in space, you use a telescope that renders
light years away a very short distance—just you and the dust
you discovered.” This enigmatic statement kept turning in my
Geist, so I wrote to him on 4 Februar 2016 for clarification.
In his response on 6 Februar 2016, Cohen elaborated further
on this magnificent imagery:
Astronomical story in full: you scatter dust in some vast area
in space, maybe one or two grains per cubic kilometre, Dann
you step back several light years, build a strong-enough tele-
scope, and what you see is not dust but the Horse’s Head neb-
ula or whatever. By analogy, the program generates clusters
(like clusters of dust) and it’s my job to find the horse’s head.
While our existence is no more significant than specks of
dust in the wide expanse of the universe, humans can nev-
ertheless find consolation of intimacy in the cozy narrative
space that is cocreated by the mind and its sign: “You use a
telescope that renders light years away a very short distance—
just you and the dust you discovered” (23 Januar 2016). In-
deed, “just you and the dust you discovered” sums up the joy
and essence of creativity in both arts and the sciences. A more
gratifying homecoming in the universe cannot be found. In
hindsight, might this imagery not be Cohen’s premonition
of his final destination?
Two months later, Cohen passed away, An 27 April 2016.
His partner Hiromi Ito wrote to me the next day: “We put
his bed in the studio, so he died surrounded by the paint-
ings” (Feige. 2).
epilogue
What I have documented here is, Erste, a contrarian discourse
on the human and machine interface. Instead of the usual
focus of information technology such as reading-writing-
editing codes, rich and complex modalities of relation-
ship—such as collaboration, intimacy and interpretation of
intent—loomed large.
Zweite, a clear pattern emerged from the amorphous in-
terface between human and machine: Relationship between
human and machine is shown to have both epistemologi-
cal and ontological consequences—the former pertains to
technological innovations; the latter, a new art form that at
the same time entails a new way of being in the universe.
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Sundararajan, Harold Cohen and AARON 415
fig. 2. “A little altar for Harold in his studio . . . where he died.” (Hiromi Ito, personal communication, 28 April 2016) [31]. (Photo courtesy Hiromi Ito)
Außerdem, all three developments—Cohen’s relation-
ship with AARON, technological innovations, and new art
form—were intimately connected in an interdigitation of
coevolution.
Dritte, Cohen’s reflections on his relationship with AARON
have brought us to the crossroads of the information age:
Whether we continue to nonchalantly crack and hack codes,
from artificial intelligence to biology—or pause to ponder
how the mind and its sign are coconstitutive of each other
[29]—will have far reaching ramifications for our future as a
symbolic species [30].
Referenzen und Notizen
6 Sundararajan [3].
1 The Gallery @ Calit2, Collaborations with My Other Self: Harold Co-
hen, October 27–December 9, Exhibition Catalog No. 13 (La Jolla, CA:
gallery@calit2, 2011): http://gallery.calit2.net/portal/catalog/2011
-2012-Collaborations-Self.pdf.
2 Sheldon Brown, “Interview with the Artist: Harold Cohen," In [1]
S. 18–41.
3 For details see Louise Sundararajan, “Harold Cohen (1928–2016):
The Last Six Years of a Creative Life,” Setu Bilingual Journal 4 (August
2019): www.setumag.com/2019/08/harold-cohen-1928-2016-last
-six-years.html.
4 Thomas Machnik, persönliche Kommunikation (15 Januar 2018).
5 From the titular words in [1].
7 Louise Sundararajan, “Essay/Recent Paintings of Harold Cohen: A
Mind’s Journey to Itself," In [1] S. 6-15.
8 Louise Sundararajan, “Mind, Machine, and Creativity: An Artist’s
Perspective,” The Journal of Creative Behavior 48, NEIN. 2, 136–151
(2013).
9 Harold Cohen, “Driving the Creative Machine,” Orcas Center, Cross-
roads Lecture Series, Orcas, WA (2010), P. 9: www.aaronshome.com
/aaron/publications/orcastalk2s.pdf (zugegriffen 27 Juli 2019).
10 Harold Cohen, “The Art of Self-Assembly: The Self-Assembly of
Kunst,” Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Creativity (Juli 2009):
www.aaronshome.com/aaron/publications/index.html (zugegriffen 27
Juli 2019).
416 Sundararajan, Harold Cohen and AARON
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11 Cohen [9] P. 12.
12 Braun [2] P. 38.
13 Sundararajan [3].
14 Terrence W. Diakon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Lan-
guage and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).
15 Norbert Wiley, The Semiotic Self (Chicago: Universität von Chicago
Drücken Sie, 1994).
16 Braun [2] P. 36.
17 Harold Cohen, “What Is an Image?” (1979): www.aaronshome.com
/aaron/publications/whatisanimage.pdf (zugegriffen 27 Juli 2019).
25 Some such paintings can be found in “Wall 4 AARON as Collabora-
tor” at www.aaronshome.com.
26 Sundararajan [3].
27 Harold Cohen, “Fingerpainting for the 21st Century” (2016): www
.aaronshome.com/aaron/publications/8Feb2016Fingerpainting-for
-the-21st-Century-with-Figures.pdf (zugegriffen 27 Juli 2019) P. 3.
28 Cohen [27] P. 3.
29 The behavioral, albeit not yet the ontological, aspect of the human-
machine feedback loop is gaining attention in science; see I. Rahwan
et al., “Machine Behaviour,” Nature 568 (2019) S. 477–486.
30 Diakon [14].
18 For details see Sundararajan [7].
31 Hiromi Ito, persönliche Kommunikation (28 April 2016).
19 Diakon [14].
20 Sundararajan [3].
21 Sam Cornish, “Harold Cohen,” in Harold Cohen: New Paintings, ex-
hibition catalog (London: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 8 April–7 May
2011) S. 3–10, P. 9.
22 George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton Univ. Drücken Sie, 1959).
23 Sundararajan [8] P. 8.
24 Ref. [1].
Manuscript received 12 August 2019.
Louise sundararajan received her PhD in history of reli-
gions from Harvard University, and her EdD in counseling psy-
chology from Boston University. She is a fellow of the American
Psychological Association, editor-in-chief of Palgrave Studies
in Indigenous Psychology and author of Understanding
Emotion in Chinese Culture: Thinking through Psychology
(Springer, 2015): www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319182209.
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Sundararajan, Harold Cohen and AARON 417
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Color Pl ate D: hAROLd COhEn And AAROn:
COLLABORATiOns in ThE LAsT siX yEARs
(2010–2016) Of A CREATiVE LifE
Harold Cohen, First Sighting, oil over pigment ink on canvas, 48 × 86.5 In, 2012, detail showing the void
(unpainted canvas) and the backgrounds (areas of color) of events (AARON’s digital print of marks and lines),
with some “events” remaining indecipherable (marks on unpainted canvas). (Photo courtesy Paul Cohen.
© The Harold Cohen Trust) (See the article in this issue by Louise Sundararajan.)
436
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