Introduction

The secret service project was developed in collaboration with Armen Avanessian and Alexander Martos for the 9th Berlin Biennale. Entitled DISCREET – An Intelligence Agency for the People, a para-agency modeled on existing secret services was formed. 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. Workshops and discussion groups addressed challenges such as post-state sovereignty, global financial feudalism, and new algorithmic regimes, to establish an agenda for an open-source intelligence service and a post-war society—that is, a society postdating the War on Terror.

The activities were documented and live feeds transmitted on a streaming platform popular with teenagers, YouNow. Apart from two trailers produced in advance of the residency, a film and a number of webbisodes are currently in production.