Mind, Machine, and Creativity: Dialogue with an Artist

Presidential AddressDivision 32 (Society for Humanistic Psychology)

Louise Sundararajan

Mind, Machine, and Creativity: Dialogue with an Artist

“No one has caused me to think more about creativity in art than Harold Cohen.”

(Buchanan, 2001, p. 26)See note.

Mind, Machine, and Creativity: Dialogue with an Artist

Harold Cohen came to prominence as a painter in London in the 1960’s, representing the UK in major museum exhibitions throughout the world.

In 1968 he took up a one-year visiting professorship in the new Visual Arts department of UC San Diego. There he made his first contact with computing. He remained at UCSD as chairman of the department, and later founded and directed the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) on that campus.

In 1971 he was invited as a guest scholar to the AI Lab at Stanford University, where he laid the foundations of the now-celebrated AARON program, a project that has occupied him ever since; making AARON one of the longest-running, continuously-developing

programs in computing history.

“Vigil Completed” 1966

San Francisco Museum of Art 1979

Mural, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1986

Harold Cohen with painting machine in studio, 1995

“Two Men on Edge” oil on canvas, late 90’s

“After the Storm” paint over print on panel, May 2010

What is Creativity?

“Creativity . . . lay in neither the programmer alone nor in the program alone, but in the dialog between program and programmer; a dialog resting upon the special and peculiarly intimate relationship that had grown up between us over the years” (Cohen, 2010, p. 9).

Harold Cohen on Creativity

Forty-three years in almost daily contact with a computer program: much of what follows underscores a level of intimacy between programmer and program that would have been difficult to achieve with anything less. (personal communication, 5/4/11)

The 4E cognition —extended, embodied, embedded, and enacted.

I could never have made AARON into a world-class colorist without a lifetime of acquired knowledge concerning the physical properties of paints and the human perception of color relationships. I could never have redefined my relationship to the program -- it does the under-painting, I do the rest -- without that knowledge. (personal communication, 12/30/2010)

The extended and encapsulated mind

While most painters use their extended (world-engaging) mind to paint with, Cohen relegates the painting job to the encapsulated, machine mind, thereby freeing up the extended mind of the human colorist for a different purpose —construction of and engagement with a designer environment, within which the painter may pick up the paint brush again, as we have seen, if and when he or she chooses to join the painting machine.

Designer Environment

Humans construct and inhabit cognitive niches which include the “designer environments in which to think, reason, and perform as well as special training regimes to install (and to make habitual) the complex skills such environments demand” (Clark, 2008, p. 59).

The Chinese Notion of Lei: ontological parity

“Around 1985 I began to see that man and machine have very different resources to bring to bear on the use of color” (Cohen, 2010, p. 6).

“after years of requiring the program to do things my way . . . it was as if the program had finally said, just tell me what you want done and I’ll do it my way.” (personal communication, 3/9/2011)

The Chinese Notion of Lei: Unity in difference

AARON had become increasingly autonomous over the years. As Cohen recounted, once it could handle both coloring and form generation without his help, “I felt that my dialog with the program, the very root of our creativity, had been abruptly terminated” (2010, p. 12, emphasis added).

Self Integration according to Charles Peirce

The self-other-self (Wiley, 1994) triadic structure of the self proposed by a long line of thinkers from Hegel to George Mead and Peirce suggests that the self needs to move toward an other, before it can come home to itself. Thus Cohen created AARON not only as a program to paint with, but more importantly as an Other to facilitate his self to self dialogue as an artist.

Artists as cognitive psychologists

. . . human culture is essentially a distributed cognitive system within which world views and mental models are constructed and shared by the members of a society. Artists are traditionally at the forefront of that process, and have a large influence on our worldviews and mental models. (Donald, 2006, p. 5)

I thanks Harold Cohen for the permission to use his works of art, and for the generous time and energy he devoted to the extensive discussions we had over mind and creativity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT