Tate Britain, in partnership with Microsoft, has launched Recognition, winner of IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation. Recognition is an artificial intelligence programme that compares up-to-the-minute photojournalism from Reuters with British art from the Tate collection.

Over three months from 2 September to 27 November 2016, Recognition will create an ever-expanding virtual gallery by searching through Tate’s archive and collection of British art online, comparing works with news images from Reuters based on visual and thematic similarities. Viewers around the world will be able to learn why the artificial intelligence programme selected each match. They will able to share their favourite matches online, looking at whether a machine can help us to look at the world anew through the lens of art.

A display at Tate Britain accompanies the online project offering visitors to the gallery the chance to compare the machine’s matches with their own and invites them to help retrain the algorithm. The experiment will explore whether an artificial intelligence programme can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images. The results will be presented on the virtual gallery website at the end of the project.

Recognition incorporates multiple artificial intelligence technologies, including computer vision capabilities such as object recognition, facial recognition and composition analysis. It also uses natural language processing to interpret image captions and text, analysing context and subject matter. Matches like LS Lowry’s Industrial Landscape 1955 with a construction image of Changi Airport in Singapore demonstrates how Recognition analyses objects, colours and composition.

The winning team (Angelo Semeraro, Coralie Gourguechon, Monica Lanaro and Isaac Vallentin) are based at Fabrica, a communication research centre in Treviso, Italy. They have worked with the artificial intelligence specialists, JoliBrain, to create Recognition.

 Tate’s 2016 IK Prize, in partnership with Microsoft, invited digital creatives, from researchers and software developers to artists and designers, to propose a project using artificial intelligence that will explore, investigate or ‘understand’ British art from the Tate collection in a new way. The Fabrica team received a £15,000 prize and £90,000 production budget to turn their idea into reality in collaboration with Tate and Microsoft.

The winning team at Fabrica said:

“Creating Recognition has been an incredibly fascinating and complex challenge. Taking our proposal from concept to fully functional artificial intelligence couldn’t have been achieved without the expertise provided by our collaborators Emmanuel Benazera and Alexandre Girard at JoliBrain, as well as the support and mentoring provided by Microsoft. We can’t wait to see what inspiring, insightful, humorous and thought-provoking relationships Recognition unearths between how the world is represented in British art and up-to-the-minute news.”