AARON is one of the longest running single projects in contemporary art, as well as one of the most provocative and fascinating.

Harold Cohen has been developing this artificial intelligence programme that produces art at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) since 1973, following an introduction to the possibilities of computing during an earlier visit to UCSD in the late 1960s.

Since then, AARON has continually developed and changed: Cohen has experimented with alternative means of production, shifts in the style of work, and a move from monochrome to colour output. Earlier presentations of AARON, for example at the Tate Gallery in the early 1980s, involved connecting the computer housing the programme to a turtle drawing device. The device would draw the output on large sheets of paper on the ground, which were then coloured by Cohen in the gallery space.

In the installation on display here, a projection shows AARON producing a new colour image every 10 to 15 minutes. The implications of AARON for our understanding of human creativity and the possibilities of machine intelligence are considerable and yet to be fully explored.

Harold Cohen spent the first half of his professional life as a painter in London, exhibiting widely and participating in the Venice Biennale and Documenta, among other prestigious international shows. His work from that period is represented in major collections, including the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In 1968 he took up a one-year visiting professorship at the University of California in San Diego, met his first computer and never returned to London. In the early 1970s he spent two years as a guest scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of Stanford University, and began to work on the celebrated programme, AARON, that has occupied him ever since.

Cohen is perhaps the only artist to have become deeply involved with Artificial Intelligence, and the importance of his pioneering work is widely acknowledged. AARON has gone through several phases of increasing autonomy, and stands today as the only programme in existence that can claim world-class status as a colourist.