Texts
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The Pendulum Swings
Christine Wertheim and Margaret WertheimTime it seems is running out. The question is, will we fail it or will it fail us? In the opening hours of the new millennium Jem Finer launched Longplayer, a thousand-year-long musical score calibrated to end precisely on December 31 2999. Composed of six gradually differentiating Tibetan bell-chants, Longplayer loops spirals through its musical…
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Time is Dead
Janna LevinA millennium seems like a long time. Not as long as eternity. Woody Allen said, “Eternity is a very long time. Especially the bit towards the end.” Eternity is difficult to define while one thousand years seems clear enough. It is one thousand trips around the sun. One thousand years becomes colossal in terms of…
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An Unidentified Audio Event Arrives From The Post-Computer Age
Kodwo EshunThere are these other forms of life, artificial ones,that want to come into existence. And they are using me as a vehicle for its reproduction and its implementation.Chris Langton [1] I think one of the changes of our consciousness, of how things come into being, of how things are made and how they work is…
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Over a Thousand Rainbows
J. Maizlish MoleLongplayer is a time capsule that never closes. It rings and rings. It hums, and peals, and rings again. It settles into long moments of near stillness, then rolls back into motion. It continues, without drawing breath. It has done so for nearly ten years now, and should continue to do so for another 990…
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Composer’s Note: 1st Live Performance, 12 September 2009
Jem FinerThe composition of Longplayer is built around the application of simple and precise rules to six related pieces of music, each a harmonic transposition of an original 20 min. 20 sec. composition (the ‘source music’). Six 2-minute sections from these transpositions – one from each – are playing simultaneously at all times. Longplayer chooses these…