DISCREET, 2016

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.

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) and Tea Tupajic.

Insecurity Counselings and Trainings with Eva Horn, Anne Roth, Pit Schultz, Yanis Varoufakis, Jérémie Zimmermann, Dirk Baecker, Simon Denny, Felix Stalder, Paul Feigelfeld and Sam Forsythe.

Live-Stream and film by Christopher Roth.

Spatial Design by Studio Miessen.

Commissioned and coproduced by the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. With the support of Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb, Bundeskanzleramt der Republik Österreich – Kunstsektion, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung

June 22 – July 11, 2016
Akademie der Künste