The Longplayer Trust

The Longplayer Trust was established at the end of 2000 to take responsibility for Longplayer's upkeep for at least its first 1000 year cycle. This involves researching and implementing the means to keep Longplayer playing, in ensuring its sustainability, and making it available to as larger number of people as possible. The trust also looks after the listening post at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London.

The trustees are: broadcaster and entrepreneur Paul Bennun; John Burton, Project Manager for Urban Space Management; Siân Ede, Arts Director for the UK branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; artist, musician and Longplayer composer Jem Finer; writer, performer and academic Jack Klaff; lawyer Guy Martin; arts and entertainment producer Michael Morris; urban developer Eric Reynolds; Anne Robbins; arts business consultant Julia Rowntree; Jenny Waldman (chair).

Paul Bennun

Paul Bennun is co-owner and Director of Strategy of Somethin' Else, a leading cross-platform production company in the UK and has been a game designer, entertainment producer and broadcaster. Somethin' Else is the largest radio independent, TV entertainment indie and a major interactive content producer, in which it has been active for almost a decade.

Paul leads the Company's interactive department and future product / business strategy. He holds internationally recognised awards in games, radio, mobile technology and interactive broadcasting such as Bafta Awards, Sony Radio Academy Awards and the GSM Association Awards.

A trustee of arts commissioner Artangel and the Longplayer Trust, he co-authored the British Government's recent report on the future of digital music, and is an artistic collaborator with the likes of: several Artangel artists, writer John Berger, Theatre de Complicite and Rotozaza. Paul also presents science, technology and usability programmes for the BBC.

John Burton

John Burton is a chartered surveyor who specialises in regeneration projects. As such he is responsible for various Urban Space Management projects, including Greenwich Market and Trinity Buoy Wharf.

He has wide experience working in the areas of local economic development, re-use of historic buildings, physical development and town centre strategies. He is a director of CIDA (Cultural Industries Development Agency) and a member of the Steering Group for the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site.

At Trinity Buoy Wharf he is part of the team regenerating this former buoy yard, which has become a centre for arts and cultural enterprises. There he is involved in creating new studios from converted shipping containers, programming public events and exhibitions and dealing with Longplayer on a day to day basis.

Siân Ede

Siân Ede is Arts Director for the UK Branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where she runs grant programmes to support artists’ research and development projects. She initiated the first Arts and Science programme to be run by an arts funder with the aim of encouraging artists from across the disciplines to engage with new thinking and practice in science and technology.

She frequently writes, speaks and chairs debates on Art and Science in Britain and internationally, and is adviser to the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society and the Arts & Humanities Research Board. She has also commissioned diary and poetry anthologies addressing art and science.

Formerly Drama Officer at the Arts Council of England, she also led the post-graduate Arts and Education programme at the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, and has written and addressed conferences on theatre and drama education.

Siân Ede is editor and co-author of the book Strange and Charmed: Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts (Gulbenkian 2000). Her new book Art and Science is published by I B Tauris (2005).

Jem Finer

Uncomfortable with labels such as composer, sound artist or musician, Jem Finer sees all of his activities as emanating from the same obsessive curiosity that has led him, among other things, to make films, take photographs, form bands, draw, write, perform, compose, play music and build installations. An enduring fascination with deep time and space has been the impetus behind much of his work. Some of his other projects can be found on the following sites:

Score for a Hole in the Ground | Cosmolog | on earth as in heaven | El Rino | Zero Genie | Autodestruct

Jack Klaff

Jack Klaff is a writer and performer, who recently played a leading role in Janet Suzman’s production of The Cherry Orchard. He is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the Starlab in Brussels and visiting professor at Princeton University. He is author of the slim volume Bluff Your Way in the Quantum Universe. His journalistic work has included programmes for Granada TV, Channel 4 and the BBC, as well as articles for The Guardian and Vogue. He is also launching a cultural magazine, The Whole Shebang.

Klaff’s comic dramas often include scientific issues, and he has given papers in the character of Professor AA Singleton Guinness, Nobel Prize-winner for keeping science unsullied by art. Last year he premiered a multimedia work on the subject of time. His father was a watch-maker.

Guy Martin

Guy is a solicitor specialising in intellectual property law, particularly in its application in the media field. He is a partner with the firm of Carter-Ruck, where he has been since 1988. He has experience of many types of cases: from obtaining injunctions against former Royal servants who threatened to sell their stories to the tabloid press, to negotiating and advising on film, publishing and other agreements in the media field. Before studying law, Guy read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. He has written a contributing chapter to International Protection of Intellectual Property, published by Sweet & Maxwell. Guy is a member of the British Literary and Artistic Copyright Association.

Michael Morris

Since 1991 Michael Morris, along with James Lingwood, has co-directed Artangel, commissioning and producing site-based work by exceptional artists for particular places throughout the UK – both natural and architectural – in the visual, performing and media arts. Since 1992, Artangel’s landmark commissions have included Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Clark’s Mmm, William Forsythe’s Tight Roaring Circle, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, Gavin Bryar’s and Juan Munoz’ A Man in a Room Gambling, Jem Finer’s Longplayer and John Berger and Simon McBurney’s The Vertical Line, amongst many others. Artangel Afterlives gives a more enduring form to some of these temporary works through a programme of publications adapting individual projects into videos, books and CDs.

Following his tenure as Director of Performing Arts at the ICA London in the 1980s, Michael Morris also established Cultural Industry in 1988 as an independent, international production company, presenting and producing new work across a complete spectrum of the performing arts. Long term relationships have been forged with Robert Lepage, Pina Bausch, La La La Human Steps, Brian Eno, Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson, amongst others, in on-going partnerships with leading venues and festivals throughout Britain and beyond. Cultural Industry also initiates and produces projects which tour outside the UK, notably Shockheaded Peter, currently making its way across the globe and soon to be adapted as a feature film.

Eric Reynolds

Eric Reynolds has been involved in numerous urban regeneration schemes since the early 1970's, many including the practical re-use of historic buildings. In 1972 he spearheaded the restoration of a derelict building in Clerkenwell as one of the first craft workshops in the country. With two partners, he started the 1974 conversion of Camden Lock, which is now one of the top tourist attractions in London.

He has repeated this success at many other locations around the country. Those he has developed and/or runs include the Elephant And Castle shopping centre, Merton Abbey Mills, Spitalfields Old Fruit And Vegetable Market, Greenwich Market, Swindon Market Hall, Sneinton Market Square in Nottingham and Green Park Market in Bath. A recent scheme is at Trinity Buoy Wharf, opposite the Millenium Dome, where Longplayer has been housed since its launch in 1999. This is the site of London's only lighthouse, for which he won a development/management competition from the LDDC to develop a centre for arts and creative activity.

Eric is currently managing the refurbishment of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 6.5 acres of historic undercroft in east London – unused for 30 years. He initiated the Greenwich Gateway visitor welcoming attraction at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, and has been on English Heritage Working Group 5, inputting to the recent review Power of the Place: the Future of the Historic Environment. He also set up schemes in the Lee Canal Basin and Gabriels Wharf.

He acts as a regeneration advisor across the country, is former Chairman of the London Saver Cities initiative, and is a director and member of several other voluntary bodies. He was recently elected Chairman of Leeside Regeneration, responsible for over £20 million of SRB 4, 5 & 6 funding.

Anne Robbins

Anne Robbins was brought up in the United States and Turkey, but has spent all her adult life in the UK. Her working career was spent in bookselling and publishing. She now divides her time between The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, where she volunteers on the programme to support Iraqi scholars, and an organisation aiming to improve the effectiveness of philanthropy in positive social change.

However, it is her interests in music and early medieval history which inform her involvement in Longplayer. In particular, Anne has been fascinated by the efforts of 8th and 9th century Europeans to mold late Roman institutions to their own changed economic and social conditions, and to create new forms of government and social organisation within - and sometimes against - the widening influence of the Christian Church.

The long-term survival of Longplayer may not depend on fixed institutions such as the monastic libraries in which some Carolingian documents still remain, but it should have the benefit of an awareness of history. After all, our ability even to imagine the future is based on what we know of the past.

Jenny Waldman

Jenny Waldman is an independent arts consultant with wide experience of arts programming and management. She created the public events strategy for Somerset House and has continued to develop the programme there since it opened to the public in 2000. She has also developed programme for Tate Modern and Tate Britain and was for five years Director of Arts Centre Programmes at the Southbank Centre.

As an arts management consultant her clients have included the National Theatre, Almeida Theatre, Wigmore Hall, Arts Council of England, ENO, Barbican and Shobana Jeysingh Dance Company. She spent three years as an associate of AEA Consultants.

Jenny is also on the Board of DV8 and on the National Theatre’s Education Committee.