International Necronautical Society
Second First Committee Hearings: Transmission, Death, Technology
Saturday 16 November 2002, 1500h

CUBITT, 8 Angel Mews, London N1 9HH
T 020 7278 8226 F 020 7278 2544 E [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Underground: Angel
Free admission to the public

The First Committee of the International Necronautical Society has called a
public hearing in preparation for its planned radio transmission project. A
range of practitioners and theorists with special knowledge and expertise in
the fields of sound, wireless electronic communication, cryptography and
broadcasting will be examined by a delegation of the INS First Committee.
Their statements will be recorded and analysed as the INS Communications and
Encoding Group begin to configure the future INS station.

INS information: http://www.necronauts.org
INS press service: http://www.vargas.org.uk

INS First Committee Delegation:
Tom McCarthy (General Secretary), Anthony Auerbach (Chief of Propaganda),
Zinovy Zinik (Extra-mural Assessor)

Witnesses:
Heath Bunting (retired artist), John Cussans (writer and cultural theorist),
Ken Hollings (novelist), Cerith Wyn Evans (artist), Jane Lewty (researcher),
Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel (ambientTV.net)

'We've been looking at the lines of code transmitted over the wireless by
the poet Cegeste just after he was killed in a road accident. The messages
are picked up by Orphee on his car radio, in the dead zone between stations.
Now, Orphee is the most celebrated writer in the world, but he knows that
just one line of Cegeste's blows his work out of the water: "Jupiter rend
sage ceux qu'il veut perdre. Une fois. Je repete: Jupiter rend sage ceux
qu'il veut perdre. Deux fois. Je repete ..." The broadcasts are modelled on
British agents' or Resistance transmissions from occupied France. Obviously,
that's an important reference for Cocteau in the fifties.

'These are transmissions coming from an other place, i.e. death, full of
cryptic meanings which they parade right in front of you, but without giving
you the key that would decode them. That's great. Our own Communications and
Encoding Group could learn a lot from that. That's why we're holding these
Hearings: to work out how best to set up our own transmission unit and what
to put out over it.'

Tom McCarthy, speaking at the Aconvention, Liverpool Biennial, 2002.

The Witnesses

Heath Bunting is a 'retired artist' who emerged from the 80's committed to
building open/democratic communication systems and social contexts. Besides
setting up radio projects such as Radio 90, EMI (Electromagnetic
Installation) and Cellular Pirate Listening Station, he has also been
involved in mobile phone and fax/mail art. He has produced many internet
projects, some highly recognised, and has helped form a strong context for
the practice of net.art. Recently, he has moved into the field of genetics,
proclaiming it to be the next 'new media', and is also developing work in
the area of physical network performance.

http://www.irational.org

John Cussans is a writer and cultural theorist. As co-initiator of The
London Bughouse, an ongoing art project revolving round the writing and
ideas of author Philip K. Dick, he has extensively explored the relationship
between telecommunications and death, incorporating his research into a
series of performances and networked, semi-fictitious 'events'.

http://www.globlocal.com/bughouse

Cerith Wyn Evans has worked with a wide variety of media, including film (he
worked with Derek Jarman), mirrors, neon lights and even fireworks. Spelling
out Situationist and Marxist slogans in this last medium, he has created
what have been described as 'subtitles for an unseen narrative incorporating
translation and a distortion of the original meaning.' His mirror work
Inverse Reverse Perverse, included in the Royal Academy's 1997 Sensation
exhibition, also involves linguistic translation and inverted
representation. In his 2002 work Cleave 00, shown at Tate Britain, he had
passages of Blake's writing randomly selected by computer, translated into
Morse code and refracted off a large mirror ball -- a technique he
replicated in Documenta XI using passages from George Bataille's The
Accursed Share. He is currently working on transmitting sound from crystal
chandeliers.

Ken Hollings is a novelist who has written on sound and transmission
networks for a number of publications including The Wire and Sight and
Sound. He has also written widely on the viral broadcast theories of William
S. Burroughs. In collaboration with electronic composer Huib Emmer he is
currently producing Welcome to Disturbia, which will be broadcast on Dutch
Radio in December 2002. His novel Destroy All Monsters is published by
Marion Boyars.

Jane Lewty is a researcher in Literature at the University of Glasgow. She
has written widely on the impact of radio -- and in particular of the
wartime transmissions of Lord Haw Haw -- on modernist writers such as Ezra
Pound, Stephen Spender and Virginia Woolf. She recently spoke at the James
Joyce Biennial Symposium in Trieste on the relation between Joyce's
Finnegans Wake and Raudive's EVP Experiments.

Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel have worked on a series of projects using sound
and networked media, including Stealth Waltz (Ars Electronica), Karaoke
Busking (White Space Gallery), Telejam (Public Life/radio FRO) and Acoustic
Space Lab VR (in which twenty-five media artists generated work from the
Latvian site of a Soviet-era 32-metre dish antenna formerly used to spy on
satellite transmissions between Europe and North America). They are
currently developing a telematic theatre piece, flipflop, using WLAN and
live streams, with New York-based motion poet Ajay Naidu. Patel's primary
medium is sound, which he attempts to sculpt into novel and resonant
textures. For many years he worked with Talvin Singh as part of the Anokha
and Calcutta Cyber Cafe collectives. Currently he collaborates extensively
with dancers, writes on science and technology (and their intersection with
the arts) and studies the classical music of India. Luksch is a film maker
who works outside the frame. With an academic background in Fine Arts
(Vienna, Bangkok) and the Artistic Directorship of the Munich Media Lab
behind her, she began to conceive and produce interdisciplinary projects
related to media and net culture. She founded ambientTV.net as a platform
for the investigation of generative networks in both social and technical
senses.

http://www.ambienttv.net

International Necronautical Society First Committee Delegation

Tom McCarthy is General Secretary of INS

Anthony Auerbach, INS Chief of Propaganda (Archiving and Epistemological
Critique) is an artist.

Zinovy Zinik, Extra-mural Assessor, is a novelist and broadcaster. Born in
Moscow, Zinik has lived in London since 1976, where he is editor and
presenter of the BBC's West End Radio Review. His seven novels, which have
been translated into several European languages, include Russian Service,
set in a fictitious emigre radio station, and Sounds Familiar (a New
Frankenstein), which deals with the transformation of sound into matter. His
novel The Mushroom Pickers was serialised by the BBC in 1994. He is also
founder, in collaboration with the New York-based Russian artists Komar and
Melamid, of the Safety Pin Society of Great Britain.

The INS Second First Committee Hearings will take place in an environment
designed by Laura Hopkins, previously set designer for among others the
Globe Theater and English National Opera.

The artist Francis Upritchard will be the official Illustrator.

Hosted by CUBITT. Supported by London Arts.

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