Harold Cohen was already an acclaimed artist when he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale back in 1966, and his work subsequently appeared in top-ranked galleries and museums around the world. So in 1969, when he began dabbling in computers, his intent was simply for the machines to help him create his drawings and paintings. I thought of designing a program as a kind of assistant, he recalls. I was to think up the heavenly paradigm and it was to do the earthly instantiation. But as Cohen found himself devoting less and less time and energy to his own paintings, his computerized alter ego, dubbed Aaron, began to take on a career of its own.
In 1983, Aaron took up a pencil in its robotic hand and tirelessly produced drawing after drawing for an audience of captivated visitors to the Tate Gallery in London. It didn’t matter to them that Cohen had to add color to the drawings with his own hand; many an onlooker walked out with one of the new drawings tucked under his arm. By last year, when the
Computer Museum in Boston devoted an entire exhibit to Cohen’s stepchild, Aaron had mastered paintbrush and palette and, once Cohen set up the apparatus, produced whole paintings, many of them quite pleasant to look at.
Cohen’s success with his computer program raises the question: Who is the creator of these paintings? The answer is by no means clear. Perhaps the creative intelligence is Cohen’s because, after all, Aaron merely does what he programs it to do. On the other hand, Cohen has no way of predicting what Aaron is going to do, and the paintings are produced by the machine’s hand.
Since the early 1980s, dozens of people have tried to plumb the potential of computers to make supplemental contributions to their paintings, writings, and musical compositions, or even to make wholly original works of art. Partly owing to the growth in speed and power of computers, which can be programmed to behave in ever more complex ways, these artists have largely succeeded in endowing machines with what seems to be the gift of creativity--computer programs can now compose original music in the style of Bach, play jazz saxophone like Charlie Parker, and even produce works that arguably bear their own style (or at least one that cannot be directly traced to the programmer-artist). But can a bucket of bolts and silicon chips ever truly be creative?
