Bard College Berlin Presents

AARON: Think the Image — AI Art History and the Structure of Creativity

This workshop explores Harold Cohen’s pioneering art program AARON as both a historical case study and a conceptual tool for understanding how creativity operates between humans and machines. We’ll look at how Cohen used AARON to make the logic of image-making explicit. Treating drawing as a kind of structured thought. The session introduces ideas like procedural authorship, distributed creativity, and the image as cognitive feedback, connecting mid-20th-century AI art to today’s AI tools. The second half turns theory into practice with a collaborative exercise followed by a discussion about where creativity actually resides.

This workshop is part of IS331 Berlin Internship Seminar taught by Florian Duijsens and Agata Lisiak

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Rachel de Joode is a Berlin-based artist and educator whose work moves between sculpture, photography, painting, and the digital. In her practice, material becomes a site of inquiry, a surface where meaning gathers and dissolves. Using both hand and algorithm, she explores how perception is shaped by touch, translation, and technology. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the ICA Philadelphia, ZKM Karlsruhe, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen. She is represented by Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris and Annka Kultys Gallery in London, with works in public collections such as De Nederlandsche Bank and the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics. De Joode teaches at ÉCAL Lausanne and has held visiting positions at the University of Cincinnati and FHNW Basel. Her recent research: AARON as Mediation: The Role of AI Art History in Contemporary Art Education examines how AI reframes authorship and agency in the visual arts. Her practice stands at the meeting point of intuition and system, where the digital and the tactile are held in quiet negotiation.

Time: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: JJK Hall Cafe (W15)

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