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Harold Cohen, Untitled computer-generated drawing

This is a drawing by AARON, the computer program that you can read more about here, first written in 1973 and continuously developed by Harold Cohen until his death in 2016. AARON must be specially programmed to make its drawings of rocks and people and trees, but they have a charming resemblance to human drawings:

This is another AARON drawing here. Cohen had an exhibition at SFMOMA in 1979 in which he colored AARON’s drawing with hand paint on a hundred-foot long mural.

I’ve pulled the drawing at the top of this post out of Herbert W. Franke’s book on generative art, Computer Graphics — Computer Art. Franke was also a pioneer digital artist, and in this history of computer art, he situates Harold Cohen among the wave of computer artists working in the 1970’s, including Grace C. Hertlein and Edvard Zajec, who made progressive efforts to teach digital art at the universities where they worked.

Here’s a Hertlein work, which I think pairs well with Cohen’s drawings. There’s something in generative representational images that has a similar allure to that which characterizes drawings from childhood.