Occlusion

Daisy Alioto on the recent eclipse and artist and programmer Harold Cohen.

One week before the solar eclipse, I went to The Whitney to see the biennial. My husband and I don’t stay together when we go to museums, we move at our own pace through the galleries. 

There was a dark room with a ramp in it and someone whose job it was to sit on a stool inside the door and say, “The floor vibrates.” I sat at the top of the ramp and leaned against the wall. My husband appeared in the entrance of the room and I waved him over. “The floor vibrates,” I told him. He lay in front of me and I looked through his bent legs to the guy lying in front of him. I thought men should lay down in public more. 

The biennial wasn’t the most interesting thing at the museum. I have spent significant time since thinking about Harold Cohen, the artist and programmer behind AARON—“the earliest artificial intelligence (AI) program for artmaking.” (The exhibition HAROLD COHEN: AARON is currently on display through May 19th.)

AARON drew pots of pink tulips and women in yellow mini skirts and spindly hands pressed beneath sharp clavicles—not because it understood the way the world appeared, rather, because it was software, and it could dictate that appearance for itself. 

“What we should stress, before we begin once again to build an image of a person-like entity being GIVEN a range of abilities, is that Aaron was not GIVEN all these rules and instructions,” Cohen explained in a December 1982 text called HOW TO MAKE A DRAWING. “Aaron WAS the rules and instructions. Adding new rules to the program was not changing what Aaron HAD, it was changing what Aaron WAS, its very structure.” 

In the exhibition text, there was one word that jumped out at me. Occlusion. 

The text was adjacent to diagrams showing designs for an algorithm that taught AARON to prioritize things. “To draw one object in front of another, a process called ‘occlusion,’ the nearer object must be drawn before the more distant object.” In the photo I took of this text, the shadow of my hands holding my phone is visible, but does not obscure it.

On April 8th, 2024, the moon obscured the sun for over three minutes and I was there to see it. I traveled to Jackman, Maine, a town with a population of ~800 people located less than 20 miles from the Canadian border. The plan to go to Jackman was hatched between my mom and her friend J, who works for the Maine department of transportation. In order to watch the eclipse together, J put in to help manage the Newton Field Airport on the day of the eclipse, a request which was approved. 

Newton Field Airport is a modest, public use airport built on top of a swamp. On a good day, a couple of planes might land there. On April 8th, anyone flying to Jackman to see the eclipse would land there too. 

My mom was pleasantly surprised that I wanted to tag along on her plans, which were revealed to me in parts. I would need to wear a lot of layers. Also I would need to be comfortable peeing outside. Later I would need to bring my passport and also a book. I didn’t know about the airport part until the night before, when I arrived at my parents’ house outside Augusta. 

On the drive up from New York, just before the Piscataqua River Bridge, which traverses the border between New Hampshire and Maine, there was a blinking sign warning people not to stop on the side of the highway during the eclipse, which is a little bit like telling birds not to migrate. I kissed my hand and pressed it to the top of the car as I crossed the state line. My husband and I compete to see who can do this with the most precision but I do it even when I am alone. 

I’ve always been interested in the cosmos. When I got a credit card in college, the first thing I bought online was a jar of glow-in-the-dark stars which I affixed as accurately as possible—consulting a constellation map of the Northern Hemisphere—across the ceiling of my dorm room.

We left for Jackman around 6am on the 8th, meeting J at a hardware store parking lot in Waterville. As we were transferring our chairs and coolers to J’s car, another woman pulled up next to us. “Are you guys going up to the eclipse? This is our meeting point too.” She told us she was going to Millinocket, which is east of Jackman on the same latitude.

On the way to Waterville, I put two and two together about J being a government employee and the existence of OSHA. “Mom, I think they have to have bathrooms at the airport because of OSHA,” I said. “Oh yeah,” she said breezily, “There are porta-potties.” 

I stuck a glove between the legs of a beach chair to keep it from rattling in the trunk and watched the landscape go by as my mom caught up with J in the front seat. As we drove through Moscow on Route 201, we passed the “Million Dollar Birdhouse Wall,” a retaining wall that allegedly cost the state one million dollars and has since been decorated with colorful roosts. 

J pointed out the Dead River, a tributary of the Kennebec that Benedict Arnold rowed with his men during their long march to Quebec during the Revolutionary War. By the time the soldiers reached this spot, they were continuously wet, on half rations, and had 300 miles more to go. 

The Kennebec meets the Dead River at a place called The Forks. The ice was pulling away from the shore with some hesitancy. J said that she needed to buy eclipse glasses. We stopped at a general store in West Forks that had been selling them for $3.95—but they were all out. 

“You know I have a phobia about looking at the sun anyway,” said J, “I was only going to buy the glasses in case I got brave watching everyone else do it.” 

In Jackman, I saw a car chalked with, “Totality or Bust” and a sign that said “The Switzerland of Maine.” Women were setting up tables to sell jams and raffle quilts along the roadside. We pulled in to Newton Field Airport shortly before 9am. There were three planes already on the tarmac, including a father and son who flew in from Virginia. Two more planes landed at 9:30—and then they never stopped coming. 

ON SOFTWARE