An Ethnography of Longplayer

An Ethnography of Longplayer: Year 25 is a work by artist and animator Jess Mountfield.

In the 25th anniversary year of Jem Finer’s 1000-year-long piece of music, Mountfield’s installation explored the fleeting nature of stewardship, when what is being cared for has been composed to continue for many human lifetimes.

A collage of the voices of Longplayer’s present custodians played on an acetate disc that deteriorated with every spin. Each voice considered Longplayer in the context of their understanding of, and relationship with, time.

Accompanying the recording was an animated loop of acetate prints, showing light passing through the windows of the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf and other non-human long flows of time – projected through Longplayer’s shadowscape of singing bowls.

Jess Mountfield is an artist, animator and ethnographer interested in unstitching the word ‘time’ to see what, exactly, we mean by it. Her cross-media works explore and ask questions of the varied temporalities we are enmeshed by.

The installation played during regular opening hours at the lighthouse (on Saturdays and Sundays, between 11am and 4pm) throughout October, sending when the acetate disc deteriorated, after several days, into incomprehensibility.