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Was this art? I think so; I don't think something stops being art simply because part of its creation is mechanical. We decided what colours to use, how to swing the pendular tray, and, most importantly, which tracings to keep and which to throw away. I think these images would still have been art if we'd used a computer to simulate the physics of the swinging tray, and generated the final picture by printing an image off a screen.
In 1968, the British-born artist Harold Cohen started doing something very like this. At the time, Cohen was an up-and-coming artist whose work had been shown at the Venice Biennale and at solo exhibitions in London, Toronto, and other cities. But Cohen was obsessed with how artists manage to evoke meaning in their audiences, and after moving to the University of California at San Diego he stopped painting, and started programming.
The next twelve years were frustrating ones, as he tried to create a computer program which would create art in the same way that Cohen created art. Cohen wasn't interested in computer graphics per se, which is more about modelling the physics of light than about exploiting the psychology of perception. Cohen wanted his program, Aaron, to decide for itself what to put in its pictures and where.
By the late 1970s Aaron was working well enough for Cohen to exhibit it, and some its work, at galleries in Europe and the United States. Cohen was dissatisfied with its abstract drawings, however, and after a visit to the RAND Corporation in 1980 began to give it rules telling it how to create animals and, later, people and forests. The rules were very simple, but could produce very complex images. For example, the early rules for drawing animals included only the notions that animals have a head and body, which can be represented as a blob-shaped curve, and four legs and a tail. The more complicated rules with which Aaron generated figurative scenes reminiscent of those of Cezanne were still surprisingly simple, but the way Aaron combined those rules and put them into practice was capable of generating arresting images.
Cohen's (and Aaron's) story is fascinating because of the way it illuminates the relationship between though, art, and computing. Unfortunately, this book does not do the story justice. Pamela McCorduck is probably most famous for having co-authored The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World, a book which was very popular, and very influential, reading in airport waiting lounges a decade ago. This book does not enthuse about AI quite as much as that one --- given AI's failures during the past decade, that would be imprudent --- but like its predecessor it is a mish-mash of technical facts (none of which I dispute), opinions about those facts which are too often presented as if they were facts themselves, and purple science porn.
For example, is the humble "if" statement found in most programming languages actually "a virtual Shiva of intellectual action, a many-handed god pulling strings with breathtaking complexity"? If so, it's news to me (and if Shiva's in my computer, am I liable for an extra community charge payment?). More seriously, while I am no fan of AI, I object to her summarizing thirty years' research by saying that "the British had interesting but ultimately sterile theories, while the Americans ... had interesting (and slightly different) theories about intelligence..."
I think that the main reason this books fails is that McCorduck never decides whether she is writing an art-house analysis of Cohen's life and work, including the work he has created indirectly, or a popular account of an artist's invention of a new way of making art. There's no reason it couldn't be both, but it manages to succeed at neither. In any case, the pages devoted to a feminist re-interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, and to re-telling the story of Moses and Aaron, add nothing.
What Cohen has done is fascinating; he has succeeded in externalising, in the form of a computer program, a significant portion of what he knows about how he creates art. But the occasional passing reference to virtual reality, artificial life, chaos, plus a nostalgically xenophobic mention of the threat posed by Far Eastern software bandits, adds nothing to what Cohen has accomplished. Having read this book, I want to know more, but to learn what I want to know I'm going to have to find a better source.
-- Gregory V. Wilson (gvwilson@interlog.com)
This review was originally published in "The Independent" newspaper, London, U.K., and is reprinted by permission.
Also see Al Stevens' review of Aaron's Code, from DDJ, January, 1993.