Gallery Opening: Collaborations with My Other Self

Guest Speaker: Harold Cohen, Founding Director Center for Research in Computing and the Arts; et al. Date: October 27th, 2011  to December 9th, 2011 Time: Noon-2pm; 5-7p recep Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego Host: gallery@calit2 [event website]

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: Harold 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 the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 1970s. Together, Cohen and AARON have exhibited at London\'s Tate Gallery, the LA County Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the San Diego Museum of Art, and many more of the major international 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 U.S. in the world\'s fair in Tsukuba, Japan, in 1985. He has permanent exhibits devoted to his work in the Museum of Computing History in Mountain View, CA, and in the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. More than 40 years of continuous work on and with AARON has significantly transformed the typical artist/medium -- or programmer/program -- relationship for Cohen. One of the few artists ever to have become deeply involved in artificial intelligence, he began with a strong thrust towards program autonomy, in the course of which AARON became the only program in existence to function as a world-class colorist. Today, however, he regards AARON as collaborator rather than independent artist. The changing states of this relationship are reflected in the three groups of works in this exhibition: works on paper made by AARON and presented as orthodox editioned prints: one-off printed images that have then been permanently mounted and surface treated to function as paintings. In the most recent work, AARON generates underpaintings rather than completed images, printing them on canvas for Cohen to develop by hand. There is also a screen-based version of the program, which continuously modifies a single image for the duration of the show. SPEAKER BIO: Harold Cohen, founding 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. An acknowledged pioneer in relation to computing in the arts, Cohen has given invited papers on his work at major international conferences on AI, computer graphics and art technologies, and his work is widely cited in the literature.