The Necronautical Society

Press - Fortean Times
	Roads Less Travelled For most of us it's unknown territory but, as MARK PILKINGTON discovered, one group of artists want to create the first atlas of the other side. Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and their capes! But we've got our brave captain to thank' (So the crew would protest) 'that he's brought us the best - A perfect and absolute blank'. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876 In 1548, the young John Dee met the cartographer Gerard Mercator in Louvain, Belgium. For three years the two were almost inseparable. Almost five centuries later Mercator's projection of the spherical Earth onto a flat rectangle is still used by schoolchildren and sailors, his name forever associated with enlightenment and progress. Dee first introduced the notion of a British Empire to the court of Elizabeth I and was a key navigational advisor to several major nautical expeditions. Today his important role in affairs of Nation and Empire is mostly forgotten, and Dee remains known solely for charting the angelic Aethyrs, his maps found only in the collections of occultists. As cartographers mapping the boundaries of knowledge, both men must be considered ancestral necronauts. On 8 March 2002 about 80 artists, writers and thinkers squeezed around the dark and distinguished boardroom table of the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington, London. They were gathered to hear an interim report from Tom McCarthy, General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS). The title, 'Navigation was Always a Difficult Art', was borrowed from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of The Snark, a major codex for the INS. It referred to the path weaved by McCarthy through a series of interviews conducted the previous year at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, with artists and writers whose work touched on the concerns of the INS. These included Rod Dickinson, crop circle maker and re-enactor of historical events - like the Jonestown suicides and Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments - that others would rather were forgotten; Stewart Home, author and occasional member of the London Psychogeographical Association, novelist Will Self, and film maker Mark Aerial Waller. A host of dead navigators looked down from the walls as ideas bounced around the room like starlight reflecting off the open ocean. Moby Dick's tattooed harpooner Queequeg decorates his unused coffin with ritual markings from his own body; Stewart Home creates multiple projections of himself, while a sea of Luther Blissetts pop up in art, writing and music, not to mention football, all over the world; the artist Ricky Seabra constructs scale models of lunar cities and artist-manned space stations; Cocteau's Orphee finds death in the mirror, while Cosmonaut Ishtaknikov and speed freak Donald Campbell hurtle towards theirs in space and water. Space, velocity, projection and distortion, key concerns for all cartographers and explorers, are the obsessions of the INS as they seek to fulfil their manifesto: "We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:- 1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit. 2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death's beauty - that is, beauty. 3. That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation... Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are all necronauts, always, already. 4. Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist... Let us deliver ourselves over utterly to death, not in desperation but rigorously, creatively, eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown." The INS was born in 1999, its intention being to investigate the role of death in literature, art and culture. Its bureaucratic structure and procedure - including the manifesto, numerous committees and a dogmatic leadership style - were inspired by early 20th century avant-garde movements such as the Futurists and Dada. "Situationism, with its understanding of both the importance and the malleability of event and structure, was another important influence," says general Secretary Tom McCarthy, "as were more recent phenomena such as NSK (Neue Slovenische Kunst, a multi-disciplinary alliance which included the rock group Laibach and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek) and the AAA (the Association of Autonomous Astronauts)." In the early 90s the NSK, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia founded their own state, which, while it existed on no maps, had its own passports, flag, anthems, stamps, propaganda, even a temporary embassy in Moscow. The AAA, whose five -year plan was closed at FT's 2000 Unconvention, sought to train people on Earth to create autonomous communities in space. With the Earth and Space already colonized, Death's cold fingers beckoned. In 2001 the INS held an explosive residency at Amsterdam's DasArts Foundation. McCarthy explains: "In accordance with Paragraph Four, Footnote One of our First Manifesto (which states that the impersonation of the dead may be a suitable necronautical 'craft' in which to manoeuvre) we used choreographers, dancers and data -technicians to reconstruct a mafia street shootout that occurred in Amsterdam in 1998, resulting in one person's death. Moments and gestures from the original shootout were isolated and repeated, first against a grid-square surrounded on all sides by cameras, then in a wind tunnel, hired at a cost of three thousand pounds a day. Real guns were used throughout." Read literally, the INS manifesto sounds more like a crackpot offshoot of the Society for Psychical Research, or the latest announcement from the Extropian movement, but such a straightforward interpretation only places unwanted and unnecessary restrictions on the project, limiting its otherwise almost limitless scope. "The Manifesto is a sincere document," insists McCarthy. "The INS has been acting in accordance with it in the two and a half years of its existence to date. So during the Austrian Cultural Forum residency we explored spaces governed by the sign of death; and during the DasArts residency we located, stepped into and inhabited the phenomenological event-field of a particular death. "We recognise the figural capacities of language. While poetry, for example makes no secret of its figural nature, other forms of discourse (such as science or politics) tend to try to deny or occlude it. Our First Manifesto is a document that can - and has - been read in a quite literal, empirical way by the mainstream press and, simultaneously by the art press as a piece of conceptual art. It is vital to understand that the INS's notion of 'Craft' can denote a vehicle and, by extension, a technology, or it can denote a craft in the sense of know-how, like cutting and planing is the craft of the carpenter. "Consider the Egyptian Book of the Dead. One might say: 'This is truly a book concerned only with the afterlife.' But what is it actually? It is a set of more than a hundred spells - cipher-sequences that were learnt and reapplied tens of thousands of times by scribes sitting in rows in Microsoft-like corporations. The sequences were repeatedly inscribed and uploaded into coffins, like a kind of software. So the reality, the actual mechanics of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is all to do with craft, writing, repetition, organisation, projection of horizons (death) and speculation about landscapes contained within these horizons. The INS's work takes up these concerns within the contemporary setting of 'late capitalism' or 'modernity'." The INS project currently operates primarily within an artistic framework, adapting, within the bounds of its own manifesto, to the expectations and limitations of its various host-bodies. Might we see it make the transition out of the gallery and into the anthropological arena, for example, to investigate global cultures of death? McCarthy remains open-minded: "The anthropological approach is not something we've avoided per se. We just haven't really opened up that avenue yet. I originally appointed a Chief Ethnographer to the INS Committee, but he demanded we recast our Manifesto in a politically correct mold, ironing out many of its essential ambiguities, so I expelled him." For as long as death has been a preoccupation of the living, it has been a preoccupation of the artist. Art began as a means of communicating with the dead, while simultaneously commemorating them. Today the majority of us try not to think about death, particularly our own. Those who still seek direct communication with the other side through mediumship - whether it be technological, such as Electronic Voice Phenomena, or human - are considered out of touch with reality. But is it they who are out of touch or the rest of a society that is at once in total denial of death and yet entirely fascinated by it? The INS claims to share the position of philosopher George Bataille, that art is linked to the transgression of taboos around incest and death. "We suspect that death can best be understood around notions of law, desire, representation, production, vision, matter. The configuration of these parts changes over centuries: thus in the Renaissance you had a clear geography of life and death, with heaven above us and hell below and consciousness suspended between the two. With modernity that geography implodes: death is all around us, in us even. Twenty-first Century Western Man, with his seventy-year-plus life expectancy, is closer to death than his plague-ridden mediaeval counterparts. If you doubt this, switch on your television set." Doing so, and presented with the continuing international furor over Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition (as a current example) we see clearly that, contrary to the beliefs of a bewildered minority, our cultural curiosity about death is far from sated. While the INS eschew what they see as the New Age preoccupations of Survival or Afterlife, they eagerly seek to ways to explore death's realms at first hand. Thanadrine presents one such opportunity. "The INS has always been opposed to humanist notions of the self as whole, complete, un-networked and thus unrelated to death. Drugs, what Jacques Derrida calls 'the Pharmakon', have long provided a critique of such notions, in the work of De Quincey, Baudelaire and William Burroughs, for example. The use (and abuse) of medicine, as it appears with these writers and thinkers, is a fertile ground for the INS to explore, linking the body, inscription, consumption and the imagination directly or indirectly to death. In Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow scientists develop a drug called 'Oinerine', which induces a dream-like state. We intend to synthesise Thandrine, which will induce a death-like state. The head of our Techno-Chemical Division is looking into this, and has forged close links with researcher Karl Jansen and artist Paul Perry, who has used ketamine in his work to induce NDEs. These are the initial lines of enquiry we are pursuing." Faced with the Necronauts' agenda of speculative morbidity and playful artistry, it seems only natural to raise the question of death as a creative act: "Our favourite example is Donald Campbell, who, by bringing craft and imagination together in a mad dash toward the horizon, went so fast that he transformed a perspective device, a mirror-like lake, into matter - matter which he simultaneously vanished into and carved a Hockney-splash out of. It was an inspired, catastrophic achievement." And as for McCarthy himself, how would he like to go? "In flight." Published in Fortean times - Issue 160 July 2002 [Top]