Fabrica Wins IK Prize 2016, Tate, London

The winner of the IK Prize 2016 has been unveiled at Tate, London. Based in Treviso, communication research centre Fabrica was selected as this year’s prize recipient for its innovative project entitled RECOGNITION, proposed by team members Angelo Semeraro, Coralie Gourguechon and Monica Lanaro. The annual award celebrates digital creativity in all its forms, and this year challenged entrants to use a form of artificial intelligence to explore, investigate or understand British art in the Tate collection.

Established in 1994 and part of the Benetton Group, Fabrica offers to young researchers from around the world a one-year scholarship within disciplines such as design, visual communication, photography, interaction, video, music and journalism. Fabrica’s winning idea is an A.I. project that will uncover the hidden links between current events and art from the Tate collection. RECOGNITION will use powerful algorithms and machine learning to search through Tate’s vast digital collection and archive; its mission is to unearth hidden relationships between how the world has been represented in image form, in the past and present.

Fabrica receives a £15,000 prize and a £90,000 development budget to turn their proposal into a reality online and at Tate Britain in late summer 2016. Anyone will be able to watch the machine at work as it produces a stream of curated images online as a virtual exhibition. RECOGNITION encourages us to look afresh at the art of the past through the lens of our world today.

The 2016 IK Prize, in partnership with Microsoft, invited an expert panel of judges to select a shortlist of four ideas in response to a brief on artificial intelligence. Finalists for the competition’s third edition include: The Wandering Intelligence of Art by Ross Frame and Tom Wyatt; OSCAR by Unit Lab (Mike Vanis, Cindy Strobach and Amina Abbas Nazari); and Texting Tate by Michel Erler.

For more, visit www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/ik-prize.

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Credits
1. Fabrica building, Villa Pastega Manera. Courtesy of Fabrica.