Harold Cohen: AARON at Whitney

Opening just one day after MOMI’s Harvey exhibition, famed curator Christiane Paul’s Harold Cohen: AARON at The Whitney Museum’s looked at another seminal media art pioneer.

This author spoke to curator Christiane about the show, which showcased the work of the symbolic AI artmaking program AARON developed by Harold Cohen (1928–2016). Originally conceived in the late 1960s and early 1970s at UC San Diego, AARON was an ongoing experiment in translating artistic knowledge—even an entire practice, a self portrait—into code.

The exhibition featured Cohen’s plotter-generated drawings, painting-machine works and live demonstrations of AARON in action. Positioned against the rise of modern AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, the show provided much-needed historical context on AI-driven creativity, authorship and collaboration, emphasizing Cohen’s vision of full machine autonomy in art.