Why an Artificial Artist?

The Artificial Artist project seeks to endow computers with artistic vision--the ability to see something striking in a scene and express it in a new medium. Unlike most computational art, an artificial artist is not an image-altering filter nor a blind generator of pretty pictures, but a quasi-intelligent agent that has some understanding of its subjects and that makes aesthetic decisions about how to express that understanding. This task affords the opportunity to explore two questions about visual cognition:

What mental representations result from visual understanding?
How can these representations be translated into meaningful and expressive artifacts (e.g., drawings, diagrams)?

Getting a handle on these questions is key to our ultimate goal of making computers visually intelligent and communicative, so that they can collaborate with humans in creative activities such as design and play. Other artificial artists in the works:

An artificial film editor that uses computer vision to pick out important actions in the film.
An artificial graphic designer that reads narratives and makes diagrams showing what happened.