IAE Detector — International Art English Scanner

Description

Detects and scores International Art English (IAE) buzzwords in arts writing with intensity ratings. International Art English Version: IAE Detector situates itself at the intersection of critical tool-making and discursive intervention, foregrounding questions of legibility, signification, and institutional power in the ways in which contemporary art writing negotiates its relationship to theory. Engaging with notions of visibility and hegemonic language formation, the work unfolds as a browser-based assemblage that maps, traces, and deconstructs the affective and relational vocabularies through which International Art English constitutes its subjects. Operating within an expanded understanding of infrastructure—the soft architecture of language itself—it confronts and suspends the provisional hierarchical tensions that mask the dialogue between critical discourse and its own performative excess. The project is indebted to the foundational inquiry of Alix Rule and David Levine, whose 2012 essay articulated the conditions of possibility for IAE as a field of investigation. Plain English Version: IAE Detector is a browser extension that highlights art-world jargon on any webpage and gives the text an "IAE score"—a measure of how densely it uses the theory-heavy dialect common in gallery press releases, exhibition catalogues, and criticism. Words are color-coded by how specific they are to that register, and the score is normalized per thousand words so you can compare a two-sentence wall label to a five-page essay. The project builds on the work of Alix Rule and David Levine, who coined the term "International Art English" in their 2012 essay for Triple Canopy, in which they analyzed a corpus of e-flux announcements and identified the distinctive grammatical and lexical patterns that had come to define the language of the global art world.

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