Digital Art - The Art of Leonard Cohen
August 27, 2022Digital Art - The art of Harold Cohen
History of New Media Art
This essay is based on an artist’s choice of media to conceptualize the work’s overall impact and cultural significance. Digital Art is often grouped together with other types and called new media art. I will describe how a pioneer developed his computer art before Photoshop or other art-creation programming existed. It will help art viewers and critics to conceptualize the process of creating both media and digital artwork. I will discuss how the artist utilized both his computer and hand skills to influence his viewer’s interpretation of his work. In addition, I will examine how technology creates unprecedented accessibility for artists that were not able to create artwork and should encourage many talented artists to enter their fields and take their work more seriously.
The digital artist I chose is Harold Cohen. He was born in London on May 1, 1928, and died on April 27, 2016. He was educated at the Slade School and was best known as the creator of the Aaron computer software, a computer program designed to produce art independently. His work is halfway between artificial intelligence computer art and art painted on a canvas. He began his work on AARON in 1968 at the University of California in San Diego. The software he developed is one of the first fine-art screensavers that use artificial intelligence to create original paintings on his computer. He created paintings on his AARON computer over 30 years and his images are unique and creative and can be found in museums worldwide.
Cohen’s work was exhibited at The Tate Gallery in London in 2016. Cohen and AARON created Fingerpainting for the 21st Century and used a touch screen to digitally colour and finish his artwork in this project. He outputted his pictures in physical form in his previous paintings before he made alterations. I will describe the physical and technological elements of Fingerpainting, and connect my descriptions of it to another writer’s assessment.
Cohen’s Fingerpainting for the 21st Century was created on February 8, 2016. It uses six primary colors to create an image on the screen, which helps to obtain the artist’s correct colour relationships on the net. The process of this piece involves printing with an inkjet printer on canvas. Cohen realized that he missed the tactile feeling of painting on canvas and touching the paint, which was when he invented the touch screen. He was using his 50-inch by 50-inch monitor and that is how his images came out with good detail even if they were reduced by the process. Once he finished creating his painting, he made a postscript file.
Going back to how the process works, there are three parts to the Fingerpainting system. The first uses the AARON finger painting system, which is run on Linux and makes drawings for the artist to colour. Once the graphics have been selected, he transfers them to the second part of his computer system, which has two windows. One is a touch-sensitive screen with drawings on it, and he creates lines using his fingers as a brush. The other is a smaller monitor, which is the controller. The software can store twelve images, which is like having twelve canvases at once. Once he mixes the colour for the painting, he physically stores the leftover paints in large pots. This allows him to modify all the colours in the pots digitally by working with the contents of the pot so he doesn’t have to paint over it in layers as he would in a physical painting. This is a technologically efficient process that enables the artist to complete at a faster rate than he normally would have if he had painted it manually.
Once the artist completes his painting, the software creates a postscript file that is then transferred to a wide format printer. This printer is then used to print the image on canvas and stretch and hang it like a physical painting. Cohen’s relationship with AARON deepened in 2010 and his artistry improved. As a result of his deeper understanding of the process and use of the technology, his expertise in creating digital art dramatically improved until his death in 2016. His new artform also drew attention to the void which is any location on the canvas in which the artist did not paint, which he focused on in the last six years of his life.
Harold Cohen’s ‘other self’ video shows the drawing of Leaf Clusters to Infinity, but he has no idea what a plant actually looks like. That’s because Cohen’s ‘other self’ isn’t a self at all, but a computer program known as AARON which is 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 and a one-year Visiting Professorship at the University of California, San Diego through to his role as founding director of UCSD’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA).
Cohen asks who is creative, the computer or the artist? Cohen says he thinks the computer is creative but that he is more creative. This can be interpreted to mean that the artist’s creativity is more important than the innovative technology of the machine. While the machine is an important part of the process, it is the human endeavor to create art that is more honest and meaningful.
Louise Sundararajan is another writer who supports Cohen’s use of technology in his art and believes that the combined use of technology and painting on canvas will help many future artists. Sundararajan says that Cohen’s use of the technology demonstrates that we are at a crossroads of the information age and that there is a lot of potential for future artists to create new and innovative works with help of Fingerpainting and other forms of integrative technology.
In conclusion, it is the human element in artistic creation that is the most important part of creating art for most artists. While it is very easy to become overwhelmed and impressed with many of the art, technological tools that have been analyzed here. It’s important to remember that technology can not replace the human element of inspiration and the desire to create. The technology should be seen as a helpful tool but not a replacement for the artist’s vision and creation. In addition, the technology creates unprecedented accessibility to artists that was not available before and should encourage many talented artists to enter their fields more seriously. It is also his use of technology that will also improve the interaction between his viewer and the artist.
External research material sources:
Sundararajan, Louise. (2020). Harold Cohen and AARON: Collaborations in the Last Six Years (2010–2016) of a Creative Life.
Gallery @ Calit2 - Collaborations with my other self, Harold Cohen
Harold Cohen and AARON: Collaborations in the Last Six Years (2010–2016) of a Creative Life Harold Cohen: The First Digital Artist | Chiswick Auctions
Gallery @ Calit2 - COLLABORATIONS WITH MY OTHER SELF, Harold Cohen
Harold Cohen and AARON: the last six years - DAM MUSEUM
Image of artwork you are discussing
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