Royal Museums Greenwich

Jem Finer: Longplayer

Exhibition: From July 2008

Longplayer, 1999-, (2) Longplayer, 1999. The site at Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, London. Courtesy Jem FinerIn July 2008 Jem Finer’s sound work Longplayer took up residence in the 28-inch Telescope Dome at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

Longplayer is a 1000-year long piece of music that started to play on the first instant of 1 January 2000. It will continue to play, without repetition, until 31 December 2999 when it will arrive back at the point at which it began – and then begin again.

The music is created in real time from a 20-minute recording of Tibetan Singing Bowls and intervals of silence. This instrument is a type of standing bell whereby the sides and rim vibrate to produce sound.

Every two minutes Longplayer takes six different excerpts from the recording which is modified in pitch and then played back simultaneously by SuperCollider software – a dynamic programming language running on a computer. This application of simple and precise rules to the source music works in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed, creating a complex, ever changing art work. Integral to Longplayer’s strategies for survival is the fact that, though now existing as a computer programme, it can be realized through any conceivable form of technology.

Longplayer, 1999- (1) Longplayer, 1999. The site at Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, London. Courtesy Jem Finer. Photograph: courtesy Steve PykeLongplayer grew out of Finer’s conceptual concern with the problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time.

The artist describes his interest in creating ‘something that made time, as a long and slow process, tangible.’ The idea of ‘slow time’ is a part of a world-wide growing movement of people, projects and ideas encouraging long-term thinking. Longplayer proposes a slowing down of time that expands the limits we usually put on our perceptions – as the writer Kodwo Eshun states in a publication that accompanies the artwork: ‘Longplayer is a shortcut to the sublime.’

Here at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Longplayer shares a space with the 28-inch telescope which is the most powerful refracting telescope in the UK. Completed in 1893, it was designed to keep the Royal Observatory at the forefront of contemporary astronomy. Until its retirement in the late 1960s it was used for research into double star systems. Telescopes push back our spatial horizon beyond our expectations while Longplayer extends our temporal horizons – placed together in this room they enable us to stretch our imaginations further and longer.

Now looked after by the Longplayer Trust Longplayer was originally commissioned and supported by Artangel. The first listening post for Longplayer, which continues to operate, was at Trinity Buoy Wharf by the River Thames in East London, located inside a lighthouse built in the 1850s for Michael to experiment with new optics.

About the artist

Score for a Hole in the Ground, 2006 Score for a Hole in the Ground, 2006, King's Wood, Kent. Courtesy Jem FinerJem Finer is an artist, musician and composer. He was Artist in Residence at the Astrophysics department of the University of Oxford between 2003 and 2005, where he made a number of works, among them two sculptural observatories Landscope (Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland) and The Centre of the Universe (University Parks, Oxford) as well as the online project On Earth as in Heaven.

In 2005 he was awarded the first PRS Foundation New Music Award for his proposal for Score for a Hole in the Ground. Completed in September 2006, it is located in the middle of a forest, Kingswood, near the village of Challock in Kent. In August 2007, in collaboration with Ansuman Biswas, he composed and choreographed First Light, a live performance for Jodrell Bank radio telescope, a celebration of its first 50 years.

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