"Advance Reconnaissance: International Necronautical Society (INS)"
2004-07-10 until 2004-07-22
Sparwasser HQ, Offensive for Contemporary Art
Berlin, , DE Germany

Launched in 1999 in London with a bombastic Manifesto declaring that death is a type of space, the International Necronautical Society (INS) is a pseudo-bureaucratic organisation that, appropriating and re-purposing both Soviet and corporate systems and the defunct structures of early twentieth century avant-gardes, operates in what INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy has called the ‘mediasphere’. Interventions to date have included the re-enactment in a Dutch wind tunnel of a Mafia shootout (2001), public Committee Hearings into Transmission, Death and Technology (2002), the infiltration of the BBC website (2003) and the setting up of a Broadcasting Unit at London’s ICA (2004). This last project, which involved world maps and more than fifty agents in an elaborate text and data processing set-up, merged scenes from Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee with William Burroughs's world of control rooms to produce a constant stream of cut-up, lyrical, crackling propaganda which was transmitted on FM radio in the London area and via the internet to collaborating stations in Europe and America.

Following an invitation by independent curator Diana Baldon, the INS is primed to move into the loaded historico-politico-aesthetic zone of Berlin. On July 10th 2004, for a period of only twelve days, the INS opens a Berlin office in Sparwasser HQ which will be used as a venue for Advance Reconnaissance to contact key cultural agents prior to the future arrival of a team of INS Inspectorate specialists, who will survey the city along central INS concerns of marking and erasure, transit and transformation, cryptography and death. The documents of the constantly expanding INS archive will be made available for scrutiny at Sparwasser HQ.

INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy will be formally presenting the organisation to an audience of press and public on Saturday July 10th at 18:00h, outlining its theoretical framework.

IMAGE
International Necronautical Society (INS)
Second First Committee Hearings: Transmission, Death, Technology, 2002

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