The magazine MAQ September 2018 MAQ Magazine November 2018 | Page 169

MAQ/November 2018 / 07

But research began in earnest with computers and the search for artificial intelligence, with human-level creativity seen as an indispensable component of human-level intelligence. In the 1960s, A. Michael Noll, an engineer, wrote a program which

generated a version of Piet Mondrian's Composition with Lines. New York Times art critic Stuart Preston reviewed an exhibition of Noll's work with alarm, fearing for a future in which the artist's identity could be erased by machines.

Harold Cohen, an abstract painter and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, is a founder of modern computer art. From 1973 until his death in 2016, Cohen worked with a set of programs which he wrote, collectively called AARON, which created mainly what one obituary called "abstraction and evocation and methods for making images that produce cascades of almost-recognition and associations in the minds of viewers". The results have been widely exhibited,

including at the Tate Gallery in London.

Harold Cohen