Tate Britain's new AI finds art in current affairs

Stare across the gallery of the Tate Britain at a Turner and you bring with you a quiet murmur of experiences – a family holiday, an orgasm, that morning's news. What you see works in co-ordination with echoes. But what does a computer see? What does it think when it looks at a Turner? Recognition, the winner of the Tate's IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, asks – and answers – some of these questions. Made up of multiple artificial-intelligence technologies, Recognition makes use of object recognition, facial recognition and composition analysis to pull up-to-the-minute photojournalism from Reuters, then trawls through Tate Britain's vast collection to plonk a comparable picture beside it.