IK Prize 2016

About

We’re delighted to announce the winner of IK Prize 2016, an annual award that celebrates digital creativity in all its forms. This year we challenged digital creatives to use a form of artificial intelligence to explore, investigate or ‘understand’ British art in the Tate collection.  

Can a machine make us look afresh at great art through the lens of today’s world? Recognition, winner of IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, is an artificial intelligence program that compares up-to-the-minute photojournalism with British art from the Tate collection. 

Over three months, Recognition will create an ever-expanding virtual gallery by searching through Tate’s collection of British art and archive material online, comparing artworks with news images from Reuters based on visual and thematic similarities twenty-four hours a day. The result will be a time capsule of the world represented in diverse types of images, past and present.

Recognition incorporates multiple artificial intelligence technologies, including computer vision capabilities such as object recognition, facial recognition, colour and composition analysis; and natural language processing of text associated with images, allowing it to analyse context and subject matter and produce written descriptions of image comparisons. 

A display at Tate Britain accompanies the online project offering visitors the chance to interrupt the machine’s selection process. The results of this experiment – to see if an artificial intelligence can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images – will be presented on the virtual gallery site at the end of the project.

Recognition is an autonomously operating software programme. All reasonable steps have been taken to prevent publication of challenging, offensive or infringing content. Comparisons between artistic works and other material are made by the software programme and are for the purpose of stimulating debate about art, expression and representation. Tate invites online discussion about these comparisons and encourages users to treat copyright material appropriately according to their local law.