Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

PROCESSING: CREATIVE CODING AND COMPUTATIONAL ART
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groundbreaking 1968 Machine Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New
York. She is also the first artist to have a piece of computer art acquired by the MoMA. In
addition to the MoMA, her work has been exhibited at and is owned by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet (Stockholm),
Centre Beaubourg (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum of Art (Amsterdam), and the Grand Palais
Museum (Paris). Her films have been shown and won awards at the Venice Biennale,
Zagreb, Cannes, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; and she has
been nominated for and received Emmy awards. Like many of the early pioneers, Schwartz
has made substantial contributions within industry, academia, and the art world. She was a
consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories, IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, and
Lucent Technologies Bell Labs Innovations. Her research has led to advances in the understanding
of visual and color perception, sound, perspective, historic preservation, and
applications of the computer in the philosophy of art—using computation to investigate
the creative process. She has taught in both fine art and computer science departments
throughout the United States, as well as internationally. Schwartz has received numerous
awards, including Computerworld Smithsonian awards in three categories. She has also
been the subject of articles, books, and television news and documentary programs, and is
the coauthor of The Computer Artist's Handbook (together with Laurens R. Schwartz). To
learn more about Schwartz and see images of her work, go to her personal website,
www.lillian.com/.
Harold Cohen, b. 1928
Cohen, probably more than anyone else, made a wide and dramatic migration from the
traditional arts to computer art. He was a celebrated painter in the ’60s, including representing
Great Britain in the Venice Biennial in 1966. In 1968, he moved to Southern
California as a visiting faculty at the University of California, San Diego. He soon became
interested in artificial intelligence, and in 1971 was invited to spend two years at the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Stanford University as a guest scholar. Since then, his
work has focused on the integration of artificial intelligence with the visual artist’s creative
process. Over three decades, Cohen developed an expert drawing system, a rule-based
software program capable of simulating aspects of human creativity and intelligence. He
named the system he developed AARON. AARON is capable of creating original works of
art on its own. Although all the work AARON produces is stylistically similar, the range of
subject matter, composition, and color is not. What is so surprising about AARON, and I
believe what makes it groundbreaking, is that the work it produces is representational.
Most algorithmic systems generate abstract or color field–oriented images. AARON creates,
in a sense, freehand drawn images of people, still lifes, and landscapes. Cohen’s (and
AARON’s) work has been shown around the world, including in the Los Angeles County
Museum, Documenta 6, the San Francisco MoMA, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam,
the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and the IBM Gallery in New York. Cohen
has a permanent exhibit in the Computer Museum in Boston, and represented the United
States in the Japan World Fair in 1985. In 2000, artificial intelligence entrepreneur and
inventor Ray Kurzweil licensed the code to AARON and created a screen saver version of
the software, which he hosts at his Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies website (www.
kurzweilcyberart.com/). Cohen continues to push his work and process, developing even
more naturalistic and organic representational images based on machine intelligence