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Saturday October 16, 02010 - San Francisco, CA
Longplayer 7am-11:40pm at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Long Conversation 3pm-9pm at the Contemporary Jewish Museum
Jem Finer started working on the concept of Longplayer in the mid 1990's
when he was struck by a general lack of long-term vision as we approached
the year 02000. He discovered Long Now first through reading about
us in Brian Eno's book, A Year With Swollen Appendices and grew to
be a close friend of the organization through subsequent conversations
and interactions with Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and
Alexander Rose.
Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time. While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1000-year-long process โ an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies. More than a piece of music, Longplayer is a social organism, depending on people โ and the communication between people โ for its continuation, and existing as a community of listeners across centuries.
Jem Finer is a UK-based artist, musician and composer interested in photography, film, computer science, experimental and popular music and installation. Longplayer represents a convergence of many of his concerns, particularly those relating to systems, long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space.
Requires an .m3u compatible player.
Longplayer began playing at midday on the 31st December 01999 in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, East London, England. You can listen to Longplayer in several locations around the world and on your own computer.
As part of Longplayer, Long Now is hosting the Long Conversation, a relay of 19 speakers over 6 hours. This format came about as part of the Artangel Longplayer Conversations, produced by The Longplayer Trust in partnership with Artangel, a UK based arts organization founded in 01991, which "commissions and produces exceptional projects by outstanding contemporary artists" (among them, Longplayer). The first few Longplayer Conversations were envisioned as public conversations between leading cultural thinkers who had never met, to engage in a discussion inspired by the philosophical premise of a project which unfolds, in real time, over the course of a millennium. Laurie Anderson and Dorris Lessing inaugurated these conversations in 02005.
Only in 02009, for the first live performance of Longplayer, did the relay style Long Conversation develop. This first Long Conversation unfolded between 19 people over the course of 12 hours; all of the audio of the conversation is available online and to download.
Longplayer & Long Conversation was made possible through the generous support of
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Long Now Membership and our partners the
Contemporary Jewish Museum, SoSo Limited and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Photos by Christian Payne. | Page design by Ben Keating.
The Long Now Foundation • Fostering Long-term Responsibility • est. 01996
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