Last week, Tate Britain presented the winner of the IK Prize 2016, in partnership with Microsoft. The Italian based communication and research team at Fabrica, won the award with their proposal for their project Recognition. The IK Prize was launched by Tate with the aim of promoting digital creativity, through using cutting edge technology to establish a route for which its audience could appreciate Tate’s collection in a digital environment. It encourages artists and designers of all disciplines to submit project ideas that use artificial intelligence to help us understand British art in a new way.

The programme Recognition will use the extensive archive of Tate Britain to form an evolving virtual art exhibition which compares pieces from the collection to current news stream images from Reuters. Observational and compositional similarities including face and object recognition will form some of the triggers used to generate a digital association between the imagery. Recognition will have an online presence giving detailed descriptions of the findings by the programme as well as its exhibition in one of Tate’s gallery spaces allowing viewers to compare their own imagery with the matches.

Its overall aim is to establish whether an artificial intelligence programme can learn from the way human respond and react to the imagery. All the results will be showcased online once the project is completed. An example of an association made by Recognition would be L.S. Lowry’s Industrial Landscape 1955 with a construction of Changi Airport in Singapore, which emphasises its ability to cross associate between colours and objects. As well as visual links, Recognition will be capable of identifying captions and text, offering a more intellectual response. The project should expose us to a degree of visual relationships, both humorous and intelligent creating a new kind of representation of British Art alongside current news affairs.

Refreshing the way we look at great art from our past, Recognition promises to draw us into new and emerging technological environments

IK Prize 2016: Recognition, until 27 November 2016, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG.

Find out more: www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/ik-prize-2016.

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Credits
1. Fabrica Team.