Harold Cohen was born in London on 1st May 1928 to Polish-Russian parents, and studied at the Slade School of Art. In 1951, he held his first exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford, and continued to exhibit at major institutions around the globe. Unlike many of his cohort at the Slade and contemporaries working in the UK, Cohen was drawn to abstract expressionism which emerged from the New York art scene in the 1960s.
Cohen represented Britain at the Venice and Paris biennales and contributed to several major exhibitions of large-scale abstract works during the early 1960s. Towards the end of the decade Cohen’s affinity to American art overtook his previous attachment to the art scene in England, where “being a well-known artist in London was not as gratifying as it was supposed to be”. In 1968 he took the position of visiting professor at the University of California in San Diego, where he met Jeff Raskin, a music and computer programming graduate. This meeting proved instrumental to the direction of Cohen’s career, introducing him to computing and coding.
in 1972, and driven by the question "What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?", Cohen proceeded to evolve AARON, a computer software that used code in order to create abstract images. AARON makes us question the role of art in distinguishing what is human, from what is machine. It has been paralleled with the Turing Test, but in relation to art. Furthermore, as AARON was not capable of self-teaching, all stylistic or image-based advancements had to be hand coded by Cohen himself. In this way, the computer software makes us consider the role of the artist in mechanical processes such as this. To give this some perspective, the development of AARON predates the invention of the computer monitor by almost a year.
His continuing work on the programme was awarded with numerous accolades including the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2014.