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• follow updates via twitter: @aavarmen Project Description DISCREET is a new kind of intelligence agency that is currently under development. Between June 22 and July 11, 2016-during the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art from June 4 to September 18, 2016-you will help draft DISCREET's basic mission statement, its goals, strategies, and actions for an open-source secret service organization. We the initiators seek to respond to the massive increase of means available to entities worldwide not under democratic control. We are interested in gaining access to such hidden fields of agency and rapidly expanding money streams. We therefore propose to establish our own agenda, distancing ourselves from our competitors as representatives of an overcome arcana imperii.
2012 •
The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange’s assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.
2015 •
This book offers a unique account of British and United States government's attempts to adapt their propaganda strategies to global terrorist threats in a post-9/11 media environment. It discusses Anglo-American coordination and domestic struggles that brought in far-reaching changes to propaganda. These changes had implications for the structures of legitimacy yet occurred largely in isolation from public debate and raise questions regarding their governance. The author argues that independent and public reexamination of continuing strategy development is essential for government accountability and the formation of systems and policies that both respect citizens and build constructive foreign relations. The book's themes will appeal to a wide readership including scholars and professionals. It draws on illuminating interviews with high-profile British/US sources including journalists, PR professionals and key foreign policy, defence and intelligence personnel.
ArtLeaks Gazette
Co-editor, ArtLeaks Gazette2013 •
The main theme of the first issue of our journal is establishing a politics of truth by breaking the silence on the art world. What do we actually mean by this? We suggest that breaking the silence on the art world is similar to breaking the silence of family violence and other forms of domestic abuse. Similarly as when coming out with stories of endemic exploitation form inside the household, talking about violence and exploitation in the art world commonly brings shame, ambivalence and fear. But while each case of abuse may be different, we believe these are not singular instances but part of a larger system of repression, abuse and arrogance that have been normalized through the practices of certain cultural managers and institutions. Our task is to find voices, narratives, hybrid forms that raise consciousness about the profound effects of these forms of maltreatments: to break through the normalizing rhetoric that relegate cultural workers’ labor to an activity performed out of instinct, for the survival of culture at large, like sex or child rearing which, too are zones of intense exploitation today. Implicit in this gesture is a radical form of protest – one that does not simply join the concert of affirmative institutional critique which confirms the system by criticizing it. Rather, breaking the silence implies bringing into question the ways in which the current art system constructs positions for its speakers, and looking for strategies in which to counteract naturalized exploitation and repression today. At the same time, we recognize that the moment of exposure does not fully address self-organization or, what comes after breaking the silence? We suggest that it is therefore important to link this to solidarity, mobilization and an appeal for justice, as political tools. As it is the understanding of the dynamic interaction between the mobilization of resources, political opportunities in contexts and emancipatory cultural frames that we can use to analyze and construct strategies for cultural workers movements. With summoning the urgency of “potentia agendi” (or the power to act) collectively we also call for the necessity to forge coalitions within the art world and beyond it – alliances that have the concrete ability of exerting a certain political pressure towards achieving the promise of a more just and emancipatory cultural field.
Diplomacy, Development and Security in the Information Age
"Social Diplomacy, Public Diplomacy, and Network Power"2013 •
Cultural Studies<->Critical Methdologies
Adventures in the Public Secret Sphere: Police Sovereign Networks and Communications Warfare2013 •
What are the contours of the contemporary public secret sphere? Some key manifestations can be found in the hybrids of network and sovereign power shaped by communications warfare. This article examines recent entanglements of social media and political dissent, specifically those sovereign networks designed to foment and prevent youth-oriented social movements. Using a number of recent examples (including the U.S. State Department organized Alliance of Youth Movements, the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Kony 2012, U.S. police research conferences, and Anonymous), it argues that we are witnessing a convergence of sovereign and network powers, one that expresses new modes of control while setting the conditions for new forms of evaluation and antagonism. Finally, the article asks, how do we distinguish among these hybrids, between public secrecy and popular secrecy, among entangled secret networks?
2015 •
… in der Informationsgesellschaft. Festschrift für Gunther …
Artists, Secrets, and CIA's cultural policy2002 •
Extraordinary Rendition Addressing the Challenges of Accountability Edited by Elspeth Guild, Didier Bigo and Mark Gibney
CHAPTER TWO Dramaturgy of suspicion and the emergence of a transnational guild of extraction of information by torture at a distance2018 •
armen avanessian
Alexander Martos