A Self-Defining Game for One Player: On the Nature of Creativity and the Possibility of Creative Computer Programs

Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Professor Harold Cohen came to the United States from London in 1968 with an international reputation as a painter to take up a 1-year visiting professorship in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He met his second wife and his first computer and never returned to the U.K. In the early 1970s he spent 2 years as a guest at Stanford University's AI Lab, where AARON was first conceived. Almost all of his exhibitions since that time have been “live,” with AARON generating art in real time, with output devices ranging from simple drawing machines to complex painting machines.

Cohen was responsible for introducing computing to the art curriculum at UCSD and subsequently became the founding director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD. Retired now, he spends his time working on the AARON program, painting, writing and admiring his six-year old daughter, at his home in Encinitas, California.

The AARON program has been the subject of many television programs and is now available as a download from the site of Kurzweil CyberArts Technologies.