On August 7, 1999, Tom McCarthy founded the International Necronautical Society (INS) with a public presentation of the Founding Manifesto, a touchstone that would inform the organization’s proceedings for years to come. Composed of official committee members and illicit agents, the INS harks back to early twentieth-century avant-gardes, producing declarations, reports, public hearings, broadcasts, and research documents, as well as orchestrating more covert media infiltrations, all governed by the objective, set out in the Founding Manifesto, of mapping, entering, and occupying the space of death through literature, philosophy, culture, and technology.

The Mattering of Matter is a collection of INS documents produced between 1999 and 2010. This edited selection of texts reflects the INS’s development, through both internal bureaucratic changes and its ever-growing repertoire of references, all of which work towards their ultimate goal of constructing a necronautical craft with which to propound and escalate the overall INS project.