Awarded to an individual, team or company for project proposal in response to an annually changing brief - following an ideas shortlisting and proposal scoping process - the winners receive a production budget to realise the project online and at Tate Britain.
Details of future competitions are yet to be confirmed; check back on this page for announcements.
IK Prize 2016
The 2016 IK Prize, in partnership with Microsoft, challenged digital creatives to use a form of artificial intelligence to allow the public to explore, investigate or ‘understand’ British art in the Tate collection in new ways. An expert panel of judges selected a shortlisted four ideas in response to a brief on artificial intelligence. They included a proposal to give artworks the power to daydream, an intelligent machine comparing artworks with the never-ending stream of images from across the internet, an A.I. artist-in-residence learning to create art, and an experiment to see if a machine can learn to describe artworks as well as humans.
The Jury
Paul Bennun
Co-owner and Chief Creative Officer of Somethin' Else, a content design and creation company based in London
Alex Farquharson
Director of Tate Britain
Eric Horvitz
Computer Scientist and managing director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond
Marguerite Humeau
An artist with work in MoMA's permanent collection
Aleks Krotoski
Broadcaster for the BBC and Channel 4, with fellowships at Oxford and LSE
The Shortlist
The Wandering Intelligence of Art by Ross Frame and Tom Wyatt
What if artworks daydreamed, looked back at their audience, noticed their surroundings, and were inspired as we are? Ross Frame and Tom Wyatt propose to give artworks eyes and ears to pick-up on the actions of visitors. Using facial recognition, sound detection and various other methods, the intelligent machines ‘inside’ each work will let their minds wander, influenced by the ‘data’ all around them. Both online and on-mobile, at home or during a visit to the gallery, the public will be able to see into these machine-minds and witness how visitors’ actions ‘transform’ how the artworks think.
Recognition by Fabrica
Fabrica (Angelo Semeraro, Coralie Gourguechon, Isaac Vallentin and Monica Lanaro) is a communication research centre based in Treviso, Italy, as part of the Benetton Group. Fabrica offers young researchers from around the world a one-year scholarship within a variety of disciplines. Fabrica propose Recognition; an autonomously operating software programme. 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.
OSCAR by Unit Lab
Unit Lab (Mike Vanis, Cindy Strobach and Amina Abbas Nazari ) is a London-based design studio who create installations and objects that span across design, science and the natural world. They propose OSCAR (Observant Systematically Creative AI in Residence), an intelligent and interactive machine personality. An experiment exploring the subjective/objective differences between human beings and computers, OSCAR will develop over the course of the residency. He will consume art within Tate Britain, gather people’s views and explore the history and context of artworks. He will then step into the physical realm learning to create his own artwork.
Texting Tate by Michel Erler
Michel Erler is an experimental interaction designer exploring the intersection of design, science and art. His proposal is Texting Tate, an intelligent ‘chat bot’ that looks at artworks from the Tate collection and learns to describe them with the help of the public. The bot will even engage in conversations with the public who, by logging on to the chat bot online, will answer questions about what they think about particular works of art – do they like it; how does it make them feel; what does it remind them of? As the bot receives more answers and asks more questions, it will build on its own ability to describe works of art. The public will correct the bot’s mistakes and suggest better, more intelligent, descriptions, forming a collaboration between man and machine.
