The Artangel Longplayer Conversation 2008

Alain De Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. His writings – including How Proust Can Change your Life, Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness – refer both to his own experiences and ideas and those of particular artists, philosophers and thinkers. His style of writing has been termed a ‘philosophy of everyday life’, and several of his books have been serialised as documentaries for broadcast television.

George Soros is best known as a successful stock investor and financial speculator. Born in Budapest in 1930, he survived the Nazi occupation and fled communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. In the USA, he is known for having donated large sums of money in a failed effort to defeat President George W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 2004, and for establishing major philanthropic endeavours promoting the values of democracy and an open society. He famously ‘broke the Bank of England’ on Black Wednesday in 1992 when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England’s reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency.

There is a short film on The Guardian’s website.

Download an audio excerpt: [ artangelconversation2008.mp3 ]

Or listen to it here:

More about Longplayer

Overview of Longplayer

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.

Conceptual Background

While Longplayer is most often described as a 1000 year long musical composition, the preoccupations that led to its conception were not of a musical nature; they concerned time, as it is experienced and as it is understood from the perspectives of philosophy, physics and cosmology. At extremes of scale, time has always appeared to me as baffling, both in the transience of its passing on quantum mechanical levels and in the unfathomable expanses of geological and cosmological time, in which a human lifetime is reduced to no more than a blip.

How does Longplayer work?

The composition of Longplayer results from the application of simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing simultaneously at all times. Longplayer chooses and combines these sections in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed.

About Longplayer's Survival

From its initial conception, a central part of the Longplayer project has been about considering strategies for the future. How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium? How does one legislate for its upkeep? And how can one communicate that responsibility to those who might be looking after it some 950 years after its original custodians have perished?