On the 31st December 2024, Longplayer will complete the first quarter century of its score. Throughout 2025, this milestone will be marked with an international programme of events, collaborations and initiatives celebrating the work’s unique articulation of time and its dimensions, and the engagement with the long-term that Longplayer continues to inspire. Longplayer Live Booking…
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…
On Sunday 9th June, Longplayer invited you to spend a Long Afternoon with Ansuman Biswas at London’s only lighthouse. This special event took the form of a particularly long afternoon, with Ansuman offering a durational performance from 9am-5pm. ‘Escaping the 9 to 5 is a work of imagination. It’s hard to see what’s there until…
On Sunday 28th April, Longplayer invites you to spend a Long Afternoon in the lighthouse with Iain Sinclair. The lighthouse will be open to visitors, with a young persons activity table, from 1:30-3pm, and Iain Sinclair’s talk, ‘Gifts of the River Returning’ will take place at 3:30pm. Iain’s talk will reflect on the legacies of…
Our Longplayer Long Afternoon on 26th November 2023 features a performance from renowned musician, Supriya Nagarajan.
The Longplayer Conversation 2023: Richard Sabin and Dr Sada Mire
For September’s Long Afternoon, the Longplayer Trust is delighted to welcome internationally acclaimed musician Laura Cannell to the Lighthouse. Laura Cannell’s new solo release, Bow & Creak, was inspired by Longplayer. It is released on 8th September 2023 by Brawl Records. “I was inspired by the landscape of the Longplayer score, its beautiful, never ending…
The third in our series of open social events at the Lighthouse in 2023 is a Long Morning, taking place from 10am to 2pm on Sunday 27th August. Featuring a talk on the practice of caring for long term artworks, at 12pm.
Our second Long Afternoon of 2023 is on 30th July, and includes a Q&A with the artist Jem Finer, who conceived and composed Longplayer.
Starting in June, the Longplayer Trust is hosting Long Afternoons – open social events – on the last Sunday of every month, at the lighthouse in Trinity Buoy Wharf.
This year’s edition brings together two of the most important thinkers and cultural activists of our age – Denise Ferreira da Silva and Timothy Morton – for what promises to be a fascinating conversation, informed by their profound engagement with ecology, race and social justice.
The Longplayer Assembly marked the twentieth anniversary of Longplayer. Embracing the essence of Longplayer as a contemplation of time, the Longplayer Assembly echoed this continuity through its convergence of 24 participants, from around the world, whose individual specialist work embodies long term thought. Each speaker conversed in turn, passing the virtual baton every 30 minutes…
The end of 2019 is nearly upon us and on midday of 31st December, Longplayer will complete its first two decades of continuous play. To celebrate this great moment we invite you and your friends to join us at a special open house event at the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf. 31st December 2019 11.30am –…
Cultural change, technology and long term thinking The British Library, Thur 28 Nov 2019, 7 – 8.30pm The 2019 Longplayer Conversation brings together pioneering creative collaborators, composer Jem Finer and multidisciplinary entrepreneur Gavin Starks. Join us for what promises to be a fascinating conversation informed by their shared interests as Trustees of Longplayer and experiences…
The second Longplayer Day took place in London on Thursday 20 June. Longplayer Day is a one of a kind arts festival that, for its first two editions, has taken place from midday to midnight at a series of locations along a walking route from Deptford to Trinity Buoy Wharf. Inspired by ideas connected to…
The Longplayer Trust and Goldsmiths University of London announce Longplayer Day, a full day of activities relating to the exploration of durational soundworks. It will take place on the longest day of the year, at several venues and locations between Goldsmiths and Trinity Buoy Wharf.
Longplayer celebrated fifteen years of continuous play on 30 June 2015 with the launch of an iOS app.
The launch party, at the White Building in Hackney, London, saw Jem Finer perform a section of the composition using 12 record decks
A Longplayer Listening post and Longplayer exhibition began touring various galleries and arts centres in Iran in autumn 2014. In July 2015 the tour will arrive in Isfahan – one of Iran’s cultural capitals
The first development performances of Longplayer for Voices took place at Future Everything in Manchester and at the Roundhouse, Camden in 2014
Each year, as a way of celebrating the vision behind Longplayer’s long term aspirations, Artangel invites a leading cultural thinker to conduct a public conversation with someone they have never met, and to engage in a discussion inspired by the philosophical premise of a project which unfolds, in real time, over the course of a millennium.
Curator and historian David Rooney talked about the long-term experiment of Greenwich Mean Time.
In the third of this summer’s Longplaying events artist and film maker Andrew Kötting and writer Iain Sinclair talked about their new collaborative work Swandown and the Long Pedal.
For this one-off event, writer and architect Paul Shepheard devised a lecture on ‘The Bowl of the Horizon’, based on initial discussions he had as part of the original Longplayer steering group.
The Longplaying season kicked off on the 29th of June with a memorable talk entitled ‘The Butterfly Effect’ from renowned artist Richard Wilson. Wilson showed five films and talked about his use of film in sculptural works.
The third Longplayer Live performance, together with a Long Conversation (at the C.M.J.), took place in San Francisco on October the 16th, 2010, presented by the Long Now Foundation. Participants are listed here. The conversations can be watched and listened to here.
For three months, Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh hosted a Longplayer listening post. The opening night, 1 October 2010, saw the world premiere of Shortplayer #1, the first of a new series of compositions by Jem Finer. Shortplayer #1 is an hour-long composition for 7 brass and reed players based on the compositional pricipals of Longplayer.
The second Longplayer Live performance took place at Longplayer’s 10th annual New Year’s Eve event at the Lighthouse, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London. Marking the first complete decade of Longplayer’s 1000-year duration, the performance lasted 3 hours from 12 midday to 3 p.m. GMT (i.e. 00:00 – 03:00 IDLE, the first three hours of the new year at…
Jem Finer’s Longplayer is famously the longest non-repeating piece of music ever composed. It has been playing continuously since the first moments of the millennium, performed by computers around the world.
On September 12th, 2009, Longplayer took a giant step forward with its first-ever live performance, at the Roundhouse, London. This historic 17-hour event spanned 1000 minutes of Longplayer’s 1000-year duration, from 08:00 on the morning of the 12th until 00:40 on the morning of the 13th.
Early on the 21st June 2005, Ohad Fishof set out to walk very slowly across London Bridge. ‘Set against the varying speeds and rhythms of urban life – pedestrians, cars, trains, airplanes, water, clouds, birds, boats and buildings – a Slow Walk is a simple way of giving form to the passing of time. Slowing down a natural, instinctive action such as walking exposes its mechanical depths and inherent dramas. It magnifies slight changes. As in the slow motion shots of a blooming flower in wildlife documentaries, it allows ones attention to shift, enabling the rediscovery of the slow, invisible changes behind the fast visible ones.’