International Necronautical Society Second First Committee Hearings: Transmission, Death, Technology, 2002, Cubitt, London. Witnesses Mukul Patel and Manu Luksch (on screen), INS First Committee Delegation Anthony Auerbach, Tom McCarthy, Zinovy Zinik (Photo: Eugenie Dolberg/INS)

Advance Reconnaisance

by INS (International Necronautical Society)

July 10. - 22. 2004

Saturday July 10. at 6 pm: Press conference and briefing session with INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy

Sunday July 11. from 2 - 6pm, Tom McCarthy and curator Diana Baldon will be present

Operating from:
Sparwasser HQ - Offensive for Contemporary Art and Communication
Torstrasse 161
10115 Berlin Mitte
Wednesday to Friday 4 - 7pm, Saturday 2 - 6pm

Directions: Rosenthaler Platz (U8) Oranienburger Tor (U6)
Telephone +49 30 21803001 Fax +49 30 44047981
Contact: mail@sparwasserhq.de

 

Sparwasser HQ is pleased to host the temporary Berlin Office of the International Necronautical Society (INS).

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 Orphée 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 will open 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 1800h, outlining its theoretical framework.

INS Information

INS Press Service: Background information, official press releases, press photos:
http://www.vargas.org.uk/press

'From the appropriation of bureaucratic language to meticulous reporting and documentation, everything about the INS has Kafkaesque overtones belongs to the conceptual lineage of groups such as Laibach and the associated Neue Slovenische Kunst.' The Wire (London, 2003)

'a mysterious organisation hovering between the worlds of art, philosophy and espionage...' Blast Magazine (Paris, 2003)

'The INS stands for a horror of finished truths and a compulsive probing of the possibilities and failures of language. It satirises the old Avant Gardes by hinting at repressive undercurrents while suggesting, in effect, that their time has passed and today's cultural networks are based on virtual intimacies, like those that exist between radio operators and their listeners.' Art Monthly (London, 2004)

Advance Reconnaissance is supported by The British Council and Sparwasser HQ.