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.

機器能讓我們通過當今世界的鏡頭重新審視偉大的藝術嗎？

《Recognition 辯認》，是英國泰特美術館2016年IK奬數碼創新得奬作品。作品通過人工智能(AI)辯識圖像技術，結合泰特美術館館藏，將當今的新聞攝影圖片，利用作品比對泰特類似的館藏畫作，體驗古今交錯的奇妙感受。

三個月以來，作品通過在線搜索泰特美術館的英國藝術館藏及檔案資料，將館藏作品與路透社的新聞圖像根據每天廿四小時的視覺和主題相似性進行比較，以創建一個不斷擴展的虛擬畫廊。作品的結果將是代表著過去與現在各類圖像的時間膠囊。

作品併合了多種人工智能技術，包含著計算機視覺功能，如物體識別、面部識別、頻色和成份分析等，同時也包括與圖像相關的文本自然語言處理，允許它分析上下文和主題，並產生圖像比較的書面論述。

英國泰特美術館的展示結合在線功能，為參觀者提供了中斷機器選擇過程的機會。這個實驗的結果是要看看人工智能能否在觀察人們在查看圖像時的多種個人反應的過程中學習，並在項目結束時同時於虛擬畫廊中呈現。