Seventeen works from 1962 to 1971 trace Harold Cohen’s investigations into representation, from his established painting practice towards the computational thinking that would underpin AARON, one of the earliest AI art-making systems.
Harold Cohen was already an established painter when he began programming in the late 1960s. Throughout that decade he worked with line, colour and pictorial space, inventing visual material that could be understood "as if it were material in the real, physical world," as he described it in his 2010 talk Driving the Creative Machine.
The Knight's Gambit (1962) reduces the painting to a single contour, stated in bands of colour, inverted in blue beneath a horizontal line and restated twice on a maroon ground, so that it reads as a sequence of moves. Pastoral (1965), painted entirely by hand, was among the works shown when Harold Cohen represented Great Britain at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966.
Around 1970 he began making computer-generated drawings, the Territorial Maps, and went on to develop AARON.
