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 International Necronautical Society

Calling All Agents
General Secretary's Report to the International Necronautical Society
Tom McCarthy

20pp, black and white illustrations
190 x 254 mm, paperback
Published 2003, ISBN 0-9520274-8-8

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.

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.

 See also Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art General Secretary's [first] Report to the INS (sold out)