The House of Stone Let's begin with a trip to the cemetery. Walking down the paths overgrown with weeds, we find ourselves in a grid of inscriptions carved into granite. These epitaphs retain a permanent tenure on meaning, regardless of any technology upgrades, celebrity scandals or company mergers. Contrast this with the World Wide Web, where information sites are judged by how recently they've been updated, reflecting the newest browser technologies and the latest convention of HTML tags. It's a contrast of atoms and bits, substance and ephemera, matter and information.
Cemeteries are dead spaces now, for their visitors as much as their inhabitants.
Traditional respect for the dead has focused on care of the funerary monument, decorated with fresh flowers, overlaid with stones, lit with oil lamps, or regularly washed. In a time of green consciousness, privatisation and information revolution, this maintenance of 'dead space' seems increasingly untenable. Already, seventy percent of dead bodies in Australian cities are cremated. Take the case of a well known public figure, such as the 'larger than life' thespian, Frank Thring. As it happened, it was even simpler than that.