The Longplayer Trust

The Longplayer Trust
31 Eyre Street Hill, London EC1R 5EW, UK
Registered Charity No. 108 7243

The Longplayer Trust was established at the end of 2000 to take responsibility for Longplayer’s upkeep for at least its first 1,000 year cycle. This involves researching and implementing the means to keep Longplayer playing, in ensuring its sustainability, and making it available to as large a number of people as possible. The Trust also looks after the listening post at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London.

The current Trustees are:

Ansuman Biswas, Sam Collins, Edie Culshaw, Ella Finer, Imogen Free, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Tadeo Lopez-Sendon, Eric Reynolds, Gavin Starks, Mariam Zulfiqar.

Ansuman Biswas
Ansuman Biswas was born in India and trained in the UK. He has an international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing, and theatre. He is interested in hybridity and interdisciplinarity – often working between science, art, and industry, for instance, or between music, dance, and visual art.

Over the last few years his work has included directing Shakespeare in America, translating Tagore, designing underwater sculptures in the Red Sea, living with wandering minstrels in India, being an ornamental hermit in the English countryside, touring with Björk, surviving blindfolded in an unknown place, travelling with nomadic shamans in the Gobi Desert, playing with Oasis, collaborating with neuroscientists in Arizona, living for a week with nothing but what spectators chose to give him, singing for 24 hours non-stop, organizing grassroots activists in Soweto, meditating in a box for ten days with no food or light, creating a musical in a maximum-security prison, bathing strangers, being a soloist with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, holding seminars in a Burmese monastery, running a club for women in Hamburg’s red-light district, playing with terminally ill children, making a radio telescope sing and dance, being locked in a Gothic tower alone for forty days and nights, flying on a real, live, magic carpet, and stopping time.

Ansuman is a Director of Arts Catalyst, the science-art agency, and also of the Live Art Development Agency. He has had a leading role in developing academic programmes at Dartington College of Arts and at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has pioneered new models of interdisciplinary collaboration at Hewlett-Packard’s research lab in Bangalore and has been artist-in-residence at the National Institute of Medical Research in London. He has been part of a ground-breaking study group for the European Space Agency on Cultural Utilization of the International Space Station, and he has been involved in setting up cultural initiatives with the Indian Space Research Organization and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India.

Sam Collins
Sam Collins is a designer and production manager who specialises in the creation and delivery of new and challenging artworks. He has worked on a diverse range of projects across contemporary art, exhibitions, performance and theatre. His design projects include Siobhan Davies’ Bird Song (2004), Drifting and Tilting – The Songs of Scott Walker (Barbican, 2008), Ritual pour une Metamorphose (Comedie Francaise, Paris, 2013), The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined (Barbican Art Gallery, 2016) and a handbag museum in Seoul, Korea (Simone Handbag Museum, opened 2012).

Sam has been associated with the Manchester International Festival since its inception in 2007, working on Il Tempo del Postino (2007), Marina Abramovic Presents (2009) and The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (2011) and as Production Designer on Douglas Gordon’s Neck of the Woods (2015) and Yael Bartana’s What if Women Ruled the World (2017). In 2009 Sam collaborated with Jem Finer on Longplayer Live, designing the physical manifestation of the score to enable it to be played live on singing bowls in both The Roundhouse, London and Yuerba Buena Centre in San Francisco. In addition to his freelance projects, Sam is also Head of Production at Artangel.

Edie Culshaw
Edie Culshaw is a fundraiser, specialising in trusts, foundations and statutory funding bodies and has recently joined the Foundation Partnerships team at LSE. She has worked with a variety of cultural organisations including the Geffrye Museum of the Home, York Theatre Royal, Sadler’s Wells, Sadler’s Wells East and Jackson’s Lane arts centre.

Before focusing on fundraising, Edie was a producer, working with the dance company Clod Ensemble, artists such as Jeremy Deller, Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, and through the Manchester International Festival, with curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and artists Tino Seghal, Marina Abramovich and Joan Jonas. She has an Arts Management MA and a BA in English and Drama from the University of Manchester.

Ella Finer
Ella Finer works with performance, sound and acoustic subjectivities as a Lecturer at Syracuse University, London. As a Trustee for Longplayer, Ella organises the Long Afternoons and in 2018 produced Longplayer Legacies: Live at the Lighthouse with Laura Cannell, Larry Achiampong and Vanessa Brown with an award from Sound and Music as a Composer-Curator.

Imogen Free

Sam Kinchin-Smith (Chair)

Sam Kinchin-Smith is Head of Special Projects at the London Review of Books, where he has spent the best part of a decade developing new applications for the LRB’s unique angle of approach, and devising new ways for it to intersect with the wider culture. His books include a monograph about the opera Peter Grimes (Routledge, 2018) and an illustrated history of the LRB (Faber, 2019). His writing, mostly about music, performance and literature, regularly appears on the LRB blog, but occasionally turns up in other publications too.

Tadeo Lopez-Sendon

Tadeo Lopez-Sendon is a cultural programmer and creative producer with a specialism in digital, sound and technology, currently serving as Chief Executive of Abandon Normal Devices. His work focuses on bringing together artists and technologists to explore and create innovative projects, often involving new approaches to emerging technologies. Until 2019, Tadeo was Co-Director of Music Hackspace, a London platform for experimenting and interacting with sound and technology, where he built a community of music makers over six years and during a three-year residency at Somerset House Studios. In 2020, Tadeo co-founded the curatorial and producing agency Mutant Promise. He has been an original artist member and ongoing creative consultant for Cave of Sounds, an interactive installation exploring music’s prehistoric origins, nominated for the Ars Electronica S+T+ARTS Prize in 2019. In 2022, he co-curated Grow FM for Chiswick House and Gardens, a public programme and community radio station, exploring well-being, mental health, community and identity, powered by young local voices in Hounslow. Tadeo has worked and collaborated with numerous notable organisations and artists to develop innovative projects and public programmes, including The National Gallery, BBC R&D, Barbican Centre, Artangel, Christian Marclay, Anna Meredith, Zakia Sewell, Nozomu Matsumoto, and NSDOS. 

Eric Reynolds

Eric Reynolds has been involved in numerous urban regeneration schemes since the early 1970s, 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, Gabriels’ Wharf, Greenwich Market, Bishopsgate Goodsyard, Merton Abbey Mills, Platform 12 Kings Cross, Swindon Market Hall, Sneinton Market Square in Nottingham and Green Park Market in Bath.

He is responsible for leading the regeneration of 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. Here he has pioneered the re-use of shipping containers to create buildings in a system called Container City.

He acts as a regeneration advisor across the country and is a director and member of several other voluntary bodies. He is a past Board member of Tower Hamlets College, a Freeman of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames, an Honorary Fellow of RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), on the Board of Governors for the Museum of London and a Trustee of the Royal Museums Greenwich, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Chairman of the SS Robin Trust and of Medway Maritime Heritage Trust.

Gavin Starks

Gavin Starks has spent 20 years helping to make our data infrastructure useful to everyone: creating and leading businesses, bringing together the web, finance, policy, data, science, the environment, art and media. This has led to the creation of dozens of companies, the employment of 100’s of people, and £100Ms in measurable impact (including $137M in four years at the ODI) and helping to create $multi-billion markets through the development of regulated markets such as the Open Banking Standard.

Working with others Gavin has tackled complex challenges ranging from climate change to government transparency; digital supply-chains to open banking. His ambition is to create positive impact@web-scale on issues that require the coordination of multidisciplinary teams across private, public and third sectors. Harnessing the power of people and machines (‘collective intelligence’), his current Dgen Constellation projects include the internationalisation of Open Finance and making data work harder to deliver net-zero via IcebreakerOne.org (which launched at Davos in 2020).

Mariam Zulfiqar

Mariam Zulfiqar is the Director of Artangel, a London-based arts organisation that commissions and produces site-specific contemporary art, film, and moving image projects in unusual and unexpected places across the UK and internationally. Artangel commissioned Longplayer to start playing on December 31, 1999, and run continuously without repetition until the end of the year 2999. While Artangel originally commissioned and launched the project, the ongoing care and administration were later handed over to the Longplayer Trust. Artangel has continued to collaborate on special programming around the piece, such as the Longplayer Assembly.

Prior to joining Artangel in January 2022, Mariam led the National Art Programme at Forestry England where she implemented a new strategic direction, developing partnership projects at the intersection of art, design, architecture, environment, and ecology. 

As Deputy Director and Chief Curator at UP Projects, Mariam curated new commissions and oversaw Constellations – an artist development programme for artists working in the public domain, and This is Public Space – a programme of digital commissions that explore the internet as a site for art. 

Mariam’s primary area of focus is art in the public domain and as an independent curator, she has commissioned projects for Film and Video Umbrella and Art on the Underground. In 2021, Mariam curated Bring into Being – the inaugural programme of events, activities and contemporary art at Chiswick House. The programme marked a new chapter by inviting contemporary voices in the arts and sciences to respond to the historic 18th Century site.   

Mariam regularly consults for various international public art programmes and has guest lectured at academic institutions in the UK and internationally. In 2013 she was the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Scholarship Fund. Mariam holds a BA in Design and Public Art from Chelsea College of Art and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art.