Calling All Agents
Tom McCarthy
International Necronautical Society

24pp, 190 x 254 mm, paperback
Published 2003, ISBN 0-9520274-8-8, £5.00
buy one now! at Vargas Organisation, London



INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy's second report to the International Necronautical Society analyses and maps the testimony of the witnesses arraigned at the Second First Committee Hearings held at London's Cubitt Gallery in 2002 on the subjects of wireless communication, cryptography and broadcasting. McCarthy develops the themes of encoding, encryption and entombment, transmission, subjectivity and death, as a model for the INS's own Radio Broadcasting Network which will be installed at ICA, London, in 2004.

The Report was delivered to the first public session of the INS Communications and Encodings Subcommittee held at the ICA before the press and public on 6 December 2003.

In Cocteau's 1950 film Orphée, in scenes modelled on the secret communications networks operated by the Résistance during the Second World War, the hero hears lines of coded radio transmissions from a dead poet. In Calling All Agents, INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy argues that this conjunction of the technological, the aesthetic and the political is loaded with contemporary significance. He maps the transmission-reception figure across Freud, Heidegger, Hergé, Burroughs and Nabokov, the invention of the telephone and the discovery of Tutenkhamun, connecting it with contemporary artistic strategies and wireless technologies.

Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art
Tom McCarthy
International Necronautical Society
sold out! info at Vargas Organisation, London


24pp, black and white illustrations
190 x 254 mm, paperback
Published 2002, ISBN 0-9520274-5-3, £5.00

The International Necronautical Society’s founding manifesto declared an intent to map the spaces that open around the sign of death in the fields of literature, art, science and culture; to plot and to follow the paths that lead to these spaces. It also spoke of a ‘craft’: as the vehicle to be constructed, and as the practice to be identified and cultivated in order to realise the necronautical project.

In 2001 the INS was invited to take up residency for two weeks in the Office of Anti-Matter (Austrian Cultural Forum, 21 March–4 April). There, INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy received and interviewed writers, artists and philosophers whose work engages themes resonating with the concerns of the INS. The interviews (with among others, Simon Critchley, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Margarita Gluzberg, Will Self, Mark Aerial Waller) were transcribed and are published online (see http://www.necronauts.org). Tom McCarthy’s report to the Central Committee of the INS analyses and compares the depositions of his guests and suggests future directions for the INS.
 
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