Art in Consumerland; Where, Exactly?

Harold Cohen

Professor of Visual Arts

University of California, San Diego

Date: Friday, April 18, 2008
Place: Harold Frank Hall, Room 1132 (CS Conference Room)
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm


Abstract:

The escalating technological changes of the past three decades have resulted in a deep rift between the domains of production and consumption, exhibiting markedly different profiles with respect to knowledge and expertise. For a number of reasons, high-tech-oriented elements of the art community have relocated to the consumer side of the divide, where they have established a sub-culture in parallel with, but not significantly influencing, the mainstream culture.

By contrast, AARON is a largely autonomous art-making computer program that remains located on the production side of the divide. As a world-class colorist its work is fully equivalent to human output, and it is perhaps the only program of its kind with full access to the mainstream culture. This talk describes some of the most recent developments of the program and discusses why they could not have been made from inside consumerland.

HAROLD COHEN, former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), was an English painter with an established international reputation when he came to UCSD in 1968 for a one-year Visiting Professorship. His first experience with computing followed almost immediately, and he never returned to London. Cohen is the author of the celebrated AARON program, an ongoing research effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence which began when he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1973. Together, Cohen and AARON have exhibited at London's Tate Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and many more of the world's major art spaces. They have also been shown at a dozen science centers, including the Ontario Science Center, the Boston Science Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry. Cohen represented the US in the World Fair in Tsukuba, Japan, in 1985. He has a permanent exhibit devoted to his work in Boston's Computer Museum.

One of the few artists ever to have become deeply involved in artificial intelligence, Cohen has given invited papers on his work at major international conferences on AI, computer graphics and art technologies. (from http://crca.ucsd.edu/~hcohen/)

Host: Prof. George Legrady, Media Arts and Technology