COLLECTOR'S CHOICE - Arnolfini Series by Harold Cohen
The Arnolfini Series by Harold Cohen is a collection of plotter drawings created in 1983 using the artist’s autonomous art-generating program, AARON, which is considered one of the first AI art systems, developed in the early 1970s. The works, featuring complex forms and intricate line drawings, highlight AI's early capacity for autonomous decision-making, simulating a form of creative autonomy.
Arnolfini Series, 1983 by Harold Cohen (part of Kate Vass Galerie’s collection)
Harold Cohen was a British artist born in London in 1928. He began his career as a painter after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art. His first solo exhibition took place at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1951, and by the mid-1960s, he was recognized as one of Britain’s leading painters. In 1966, he was selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Portrait of Harold Cohen with SGI System in 1995 © Harold Cohen, Boston Computer Museum, 1995. Courtesy of Hank Morgan & Harold Cohen Trust
In 1968, at the peak of his painting career, he moved to the United States to take up a visiting lecturer position at the University of California, San Diego. There, he learned the programming language FORTRAN, and in 1971, he joined Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for a two-year residency. During this period, he began exploring the potential of machine-generated art, which eventually led to the development of AARON.
Detail of the British Pavilion at the 1966 Venice Biennale, showing Cohen’s painting on the right, Courtesy Harold Cohen’s archive
He began developing AARON in the early 1970s and continued to refine it until his passing in 2016. AARON uses a set of predefined rules created by Cohen to autonomously generate images, enabling the program to independently make decisions on composition and color palette. The title refers to the biblical figure who was anointed as a speaker for his brother Moses and raises questions about the way artistic creation is often regarded as a form of communication with the divine.
Arnolfini Series, 1983 by Harold Cohen
The software has generated artworks using Cohen’s custom-built plotters and painting machines, which translate computer commands into line drawings on paper with automated pens and apply color using brushes. In its early years, AARON could only produce monochrome line drawings, which were sometimes hand-colored by Cohen.
The 1979 exhibition Drawings at SFMOMA featured a “turtle” robot creating drawings in the gallery, Source: Collection of the Computer History Museum, 102627449
The Arnolfini Series, created in 1983, is an example of Harold Cohen’s early machine-generated drawings before AARON incorporated figuration. These plotter drawings in ink on paper were produced using Cohen’s software and presented at his exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in the same year. The works consist of fragmented lines and geometric structures, demonstrating the system’s ability to generate non-representational compositions based on programmed rules.
Arnolfini Series, 1983 by Harold Cohen
In the years following this series, Cohen continued developing AARON, modifying the program so that it could choose and apply colors autonomously and generate real-world forms, including foliage and human figures. He continued working on AARON until his death in 2016, refining its capabilities and further exploring the relationship between artistic decision-making and computational processes.
One piece from the series is part of @ArtOnBlockchain’s collection.