Armen Avanessian * 1973 in Vienna, lives and works in Berlin
Alexander Martos * 1972 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna
In collaboration with Christopher Roth
DISCREET – An Intelligence Agency for the People is described by Armen Avanessian and Alexander Martos as a para-agency modeled on existing secret services. During a three-week residency at the 9th Berlin Biennale, renegade experts from the fields of the arts, theory, technology, politics, law, hacktivism, and finance analyze and rework some of the core codes of the twenty-first century. Addressing challenges such as post-state sovereignty, global financial feudalism, and new algorithmic regimes, they will establish an agenda for an open-source intelligence service and a post-war society—that is, a society postdating the War on Terror. Occasionally accomplices will drop by to question strategies while providing coaching in specific techniques or offering the deep knowledge, historical context, and data resources that foster open intelligence. Can a small group of individuals with differently “limited” forms of knowledge and little time find answers to the difficult questions of a world where power relationships can no longer be measured on human scale? Is this the birth of a new actor within what has been, until now, the utterly unfree market for secret service providers?
Live stream starting June 23, 11 am: http://discreet.global/
DISCREET Insecurity Counseling
With Armen Avanessian/Alexander Martos and accomplices
In English
7 pm
Akademie der Künste, 2nd floor
Public Events 23.6, 30.6, 7.7.2016
List of works
DISCREET – An Intelligence Agency for the People, 2016
22.6.–11.7.2016
Semi-public working conversations
Participants AGENCY (Stephen Howell Mueller, Ersela Kripa), Webb Allen, Gertjan Boulet, Kathleen Elizabeth Li-Ying Ditzig, Lilas Guevara, Stefan Heidenreich, Amanda Kim, Judith Meyer, Peng! (Paul von Ribbeck, Gloria Spindle, Justus Klaus), Pietro Pezzani, Daniel Schwarz, TVGOV (Sofia Bastidas, Nicole Doran, Guillermo Leon Gomez, Peter Fend and Agustina Woodgate), Tea Tupajic
Staging Markus Miessen
Courtesy Armen Avanessian/Alexander Martos, Christopher Roth
Commissioned and coproduced by Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
With the support of Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb, Bundeskanzleramt der Republik Österreich – Kunstsektion, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung
Trailer still of DISCREET – An Intelligence Agency for the People, 2016, © Christopher Roth
