[rohrpost] INS Advance Reconnaissance, Berlin, July 10-22, 2004

[Inke Arns]

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For immediate release

Advance Reconnaissance, July 2004
International Necronautical Society (INS)

10 – 22 July 2004
Opening hours: Wednesday – Friday 1600-1900h, Saturday 1400-1800h
Admission Free

Saturday 10 July 2004, 1800h: Press conference and briefing session 
with INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy

Operating from: Sparwasser HQ, Offensive for Contemporary Art and 
Communication
Torstrasse 161
D - 10115 Berlin Mitte
Directions: Rosenthaler Platz (U8)
Telephone +49 30 21803001  Fax +49 30 44047981
Contact: mail at 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 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 sd18:00h, outlining its theoretical framework.

INS Information: http://www.sparwasserhq/necronauts/
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)



Inke Arns
http://www.v2.nl/~arns