Harold Cohen (1928-2016) was a British painter who, after an established career in the London art world alongside contemporaries such as David Hockney, turned in the late 1960s to programming a computer to make art. The result was AARON, a rule-based drawing and painting program he began developing in earnest around 1973 and continued to extend for the rest of his life.
Cohen trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale before moving to the United States, where he encountered computing at the University of California, San Diego. Rather than use the computer as a tool to execute a finished idea, he tried to encode the knowledge a person needs to make a coherent drawing - how to close a form, how to place figures in a scene, how to suggest depth. AARON drew autonomously, sometimes through a physical “turtle” robot that moved across paper on a gallery floor, as in a 1979 demonstration. By the mid-1990s AARON could both compose and color its own images.
Cohen described his decades with the program as a collaboration and framed the central research question plainly: he spent roughly twenty years teaching AARON to draw before turning to the harder problem of teaching it to use color. His work is one of the longest continuously developed programs in the history of computer art.
For business readers, Cohen is a reminder that machine-made art predates today’s image generators by half a century, and that early systems encoded human expertise by hand rather than learning it from data.