Dagstuhl-Seminar — Conveying the Essence via Abstraction: From Art to AI

In this Dagstuhl Seminar, we will explore the particularly important human domain of visual art, in order to obtain further insights into the cognitive ability of abstraction. Art is a culturally old and worldwide established means for humans to express their thoughts, emotions and views about the world, often as an expression of non-expressible or verbalizable information, episodes or experiences. We argue that understanding human reasoning, especially the ability to abstract, art is a valuable and rich candidate to be systematically analyzed. The seminar offers a unique opportunity to gather computer scientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, artists, and art historians to explore the art domain toward understanding the cognitive tools needed for building AI systems with better abstraction abilities to be used for more understandable representations. The seminar will focus on how AI and art conceptualize abstraction by identifying the similarities and the differences, the role of abstraction in understandability, and how it can contribute to XAI.