CounterIntelligence: A Glossary of Doubled Agency

Charles Stankievech uncovers the interconnected histories of art, military technology and espionage. The following glossary contemplates the intersections of art and military intelligence communities, presenting case studies that explore the hidden gestures and strategic deceptions of the shadow world. Navigating a theatre of double agents and the duplicity of objects that oscillate between art and artefact, the question arises: not only what is the subject, but how does this subject shape subjectivity? In thinking about the poetic contra the paranoid, one must pass though Paul Klee’s theory of making the invisible visible and into the field of secret epistemology, which understands that decoding the image is sometimes not as important as realising that the spectacle of the image itself serves to hide what matters most.