Keynote: '...but the clouds : a valediction permitting mourning, in three stages of decline'

Sugar cubes are an accretion of sucrose, formed into a solid and static lump or mass of tiny crystalline carbohydrates that hold their shape until placed in liquid. And yet it is liquid that enables sugar crystals to be formed into solid objects in the first place when subjected to heat. They are kind of like clouds. Ethereal, particulate and dissolvable, they are always already on the way to becoming nothing. The sugar cube is a pharmakon of sorts, an integer of opposites that in its either/or-ness can never be reconciled. Like William Gibson's epochal notion of cyberspace, its imminent nothingness is like the 'non space of the mind', intangible, dissolute. And like presence at a distance in telecommunications or writing it transforms and changes the conditions of the environment in which it is immersed. The dissolving sugar cube also resembles even less tangible, invisible states of cultural matter, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the 'noosphere', a stage in the evolution of human life when the earth gets a new skin, not dissimilar to a rabbit's kin, as we have just seen. In his singularly mind blowing Phenomenon of Man (1955), de Chardin describes the noosphere as 'organised matter in its dispersed state', human vibrations 'resounding by the million' around the physical earth. Writing on human evolution during the 1920s and 1930s he intuitively anticipated in the concept of the noosphere something like the Internet that could garner 'a whole layer of human consciousness exerting simultaneous pressure upon the future and the collected and hoarded produce of a million years of thought'. But more tellingly, he even anticipated the problems of nomenclature under a cloud, the difficulty of giving a material name to the immaterial. 'Have we ever tried to form an idea', he asks, of the magnitude of human thought outered from the senses into a thinking layer that circumscribes the world like the atmosphere? De Chardin never uses the word information. But that is the moniker that has been given to the technological age he was imagining.