Harold Cohen
In a recent box lot I found a number of post cards addressed to the Vancouver Art Gallery. What was interesting is that the majority of them were informing the gallery of various art exhibitions.
This one piqued my interest because the image side of the post card was extremely interesting.
What at first appeared as just simple squiggles and random lines turned out to be digital art created by Cohen through his computer program AARON.
Who Was Harold Cohen
Harold Cohen was a British born, digital artist, born to Polish-Russian parents on May 1, 1928, in London. He was educated at the Slade School of Fine Art which is part of the University College of London.
In 1968 he left the UK for a one-year appointment as a visiting lecturer in art at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). This one year stint ended up with him retiring in 1994 as a professor emeritus after serving as department chair and then Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD.
He taught himself how to program and developed AARON along with machines that could translate the artwork developed from AARON into a physical form.
Cohen passed away on April 27, 2016.
You can find out more about Harold Cohen and his life at the following links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Cohen_(artist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON
http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/index.html