AARON is a software program written by artist
Harold CohenHarold Cohen is a British-born artist who is noted as the creator of AARON-External links:*...
that creates original artistic images.
Proceeding from Cohen's initial question "What are the minimum conditions under which a set of marks functions as an image?", AARON has been in continual development since 1973. The name "AARON" does not seem to be an acronym, rather it was a name chosen to start with the letter "A" so that the names of successive programs could follow it alphabetically.
Initial versions of AARON created abstract drawings that grew more complex through the 1970s. More representational imagery was added in the 1980s; first rocks, then plants, then people. In the 1990s more representational figures set in interior scenes were added, along with colour. AARON returned to more abstract imagery, this time in colour, in the early 2000s.
AARON initially drew in black and white using a succession of custom-built "turtle" and flatbed plotter devices. Cohen would sometimes colour these images by hand in fabric dye (Procion), or scale them up to make larger paintings and murals. In the 1990s Cohen built a series of painting machines to output AARON's images in ink and fabric dye. He now uses a large-scale inkjet printer.
Development of AARON began in the
C programming languageC is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
then switched to
LispLisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...
in the early 1990s. Cohen credits Lisp with helping him solve the challenges he faced in adding colour capabilities to AARON.
Raymond KurzweilRaymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments...
's company has produced a downloadable
screensaverA screensaver is a type of computer program initially designed to prevent phosphor burn-in on CRT and plasma computer monitors by blanking the screen or filling it with moving images or patterns when the computer is not in use...
of AARON for
Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
PCA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s. This version of AARON can also produce printable images. AARON's
source codeIn computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
is not publicly available, but Cohen has described AARON's operations in various essays and it is discussed in abstract in
Pamela McCorduckPamela McCorduck is the author of a number of books concerning the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence, the future of engineering and the role of women and technology. She is also the author of three novels. She is a contributor to Omni, New York Times, Daedalus, the...
's book.
AARON cannot learn new styles or imagery on its own, each new capability must be hand-coded by Harold Cohen, but it is capable of producing a practically infinite supply of distinct images in its own style. Examples of these images have been exhibited in galleries worldwide, the exhibitions serving as an artistic equivalent of the
Turing testThe Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
. It does seem however that AARON's output follows a noticeable formula (figures standing next to a potted plant, framed within a coloured square is a common theme).
Cohen is very careful not to claim that AARON is creative. But he does ask "If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly, and in what ways, other than its origin, does it differ from the 'real thing?' If it is not thinking, what exactly is it doing?" —
The further exploits of AARON, Painter. However, it could be argued that AARON is simply following procedural instructions and that the real artist behind each piece is AARON's creator, Cohen. Adding further weight to this argument is AARON's seemingly narrow 'library' of human form variations, poses and scene compositions and the requirement of hard coding to add new 'styles'.
External links