Longplayer was commissioned by Artangel and is in the care of The Longplayer Trust
Paul Shepheard continued the series of talks and events at Trinity Buoy Wharf on Thursday July 28th, following Richard Wilson’s opening talk and performance in June.
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.
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.
