The Longplayer Conversation 2024

THE LONGPLAYER CONVERSATION 2024:
Kate Briggs and Daisy Hildyard

At Swedenborg Hall
12th December 2024, 7pm
Tickets: £5 – eventbrite.

The Longplayer Conversation invites leading cultural and scientific voices to conduct a public discussion inspired by the work’s unique dramatization of time itself, and its kaleidoscopic resonances. This year, as Longplayer approaches the end of its first quarter century, Kate Briggs will be in conversation with Daisy Hildyard: two fiercely original authors working on the politics and poetics of the long form and the long term.

They will discuss the myriad implications of duration and the long view in terms of both writing and living: the complexities of deep time and its unsettling of scales; the insidious nature of slow violence; narrations and rationalizations of the half-understood; and the significance of care-time as a radical form of response, in which writing, translating and friendship act as tactics of attending, handing over and carrying on.

TICKETS: £5 via eventbrite. BOOKING ESSENTIAL.

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator. She is the author of This Little Art (2017, an essay on the practice of translation) and The Long Form (2023, a novel). She lives in Rotterdam, NL, where she teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Daisy Hildyard is the author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in York in the north of England.

The evening also heralds the arrival of the much-anticipated issue 0.05 of the Swedenborg Review, featuring essays, photography, fiction, poetry and reviews from writers and artists, including Iain Sinclair, Avery Curran, Jarett Kobek, Sally O’Reilly and Hans Ulrich Obrist, amongst many others. All ticketholders for the Longplayer Conversation can also visit Swedenborg House’s current exhibition, Swedenborg’s Lusthus: Into the Garden, which will have extended opening hours for those attending the Longplayer Conversation

More about Longplayer

Overview of Longplayer

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.

Conceptual Background

While Longplayer is most often described as a 1000 year long musical composition, the preoccupations that led to its conception were not of a musical nature; they concerned time, as it is experienced and as it is understood from the perspectives of philosophy, physics and cosmology. At extremes of scale, time has always appeared to me as baffling, both in the transience of its passing on quantum mechanical levels and in the unfathomable expanses of geological and cosmological time, in which a human lifetime is reduced to no more than a blip.

How does Longplayer work?

The composition of Longplayer results from the application of simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing simultaneously at all times. Longplayer chooses and combines these sections in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed.

About Longplayer's Survival

From its initial conception, a central part of the Longplayer project has been about considering strategies for the future. How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium? How does one legislate for its upkeep? And how can one communicate that responsibility to those who might be looking after it some 950 years after its original custodians have perished?

The Longplayer Trust

Long Term Art Projects

. . . some other long term art projects . . .