“On reaching the corner of Greenwich Park, a quiet suburban district, the police had found, amid a motley debris of trees, bushes and railings, the charred and shattered remains of a man.” Newspaper report, 1894. “Wait till they start on the Greenwich Observatory. London without time will cause them to wake up.” Suffragette conversation, 1913.

David Rooney is currently a curator at the Science Museum and formerly curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, and was involved in the installation of Longplayer listening posts at both museums. He is interested in the roles played by material artefacts in long-term institutional survival strategies, and the ways people can seek to destabilise experiments in normalisation.

Conversations and events are now archived here, along with an audio recording of this talk.

Further documentation, from this and other talks, will be posted before long.

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“Kötting hauled a plastic swan, a lure, as we walked. We were accompanied by a pair of mature students from the art college where he taught: one of them had got himself into shape for this by completing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and the other kept a record with a pinhole camera made from a Swan Vesta matchbox. Random encounters calibrated our progress.”

Iain Sinclair 2010

www.swandown.info

Conversations and events are now archived here, along with an audio recording of this talk.

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Architect and writer Paul Shepheard presented a talk entitled The Bowl of the Horizon : Paul Shepheard’s relationship with Longplayer stretches back to the mid 1990′s when he was part of a think tank discussing Jem Finer’s evolving ideas as to what form the composition might take. The starting point for this lecture is a conversation that took place during one of these meetings, as to what kind of instrument might play for a thousand years, one of the examples being the cathedral clock in Salisbury Cathedral, which is now about 800 years old.

“Developing from this are some thoughts about the gothic cathedrals, which model deep time structures in actual space. There is a sense in which infrastructure overcomes its first purpose and develops meaning over long periods of time. This is most telling in viewing the horizon, which is what the lecture will ultimately describe.” Paul Shepheard

Paul Shepheard is a writer living in London, England. He is married with three children. He is qualified as an architect but since the publication of What is Architecture ? by the MIT Press in 1994 has gradually shifted the emphasis of his activities to writing and lecturing. He has two other books with the MIT Press, The Cultivated Wilderness, about landscape, 1997, and Artificial Love about architecture and machines, 2003. He has taught at the Architectural Association in London, the University of Texas at Austin and the Academie Van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam.

www.paulshepheard.com

Future Events: 7th of September: Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair will be talking about the Long Pedal and their new collaboration SWANDOWN and on the 28th of September David Rooney presents Navigating experimental invention, survival and destruction: the Royal Observatory and GMT. Later in the year there will a performance of a new work by Ansuman Biswas, Far Player, in collaboration with students from U.E.L., dates to be confirmed.

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Artist Richard Wilson spoke about  and offered a performative response to his use of films in sculptures in a talk called The Butterfly Effect .

Richard Wilson, born 1953, is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space which draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

www.richardwilsonsculptor.com

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Longplayer & Long Conversation, San Francisco October 16th, 02010 from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

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The conversations can be watched and listened to here.

Longplayer instrument construction in San Francisco at YBCA from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

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