Harold Cohen's 'other self' can draw leaf clusters ad infinitum, but has no idea what a plant actually looks like. It can draw a wide range of human figures, but lacks corporeality of its own.
That's because Cohen's 'other self' isn't a self at all, but a computer program known as AARON. An ongoing research effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence, AARON has been Cohen's life-work for more than 40 years, from his stint as a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1970s through a one-year Visiting Professorship at the University of California, San Diego, that later morphed into a role as founding director of UCSD's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA).
Cohen is exhibiting a selection of paintings created in collaboration with AARON at the UC San Diego gallery@calit2, which is located in Atkinson Hall at the division headquarters of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). The exhibition, titled "Collaborations with my Other Self," opened yesterday and runs through Dec. 9. The opening will be followed by a panel discussion from noon to 2 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28.