On the first morning of the new millennium, January 1st 2000, people strolling around the London docklands began to hear something.
Gentle high bell sound followed by soft tinkling began to emanate from loudspeakers at the disused Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse in London’s Docklands. This was the start of not only the year 2000 and whatever lay beyond, but also the start of Jem Finer’s Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long composition made from recordings of Tibetan prayer bowls, looped and stretched by a computer and programmed to never repeat until 2999.
Some five years later, Artangel, the London-based arts organisation behind the project, commemorated the fifth anniversary of Longplayer by inviting two cultural leaders, aware of each other’s work but never having met, to engage in a discussion.
This concept of a Longplayer conversation sprang from a philosophical premise of a project which unfolds, in real time, over the course of a millennium – inspired by the same concept that is at the core of Finer’s musical Longplayer.
This inaugural conversation, in 2005, paired experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson and acclaimed British author, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing.
Doris Lessing and Laurie Anderson hadn’t met until earlier that month, when Anderson arrived in London to prepare for her recent shows. They had decided that they wanted the conversation to be completely spontaneous, with the only prompt they used to keep themselves more or less on track was a flipchart behind their chairs on which they’d written a series of loosely-associated topics that they thought might trigger interesting exchanges.
The two of them hit an instant rapport, discussing such things as their deepest fears, what they had learned (and are still learning) throughout their interesting careers, and also their theories and perception of society and conditioning upon all of us who live within its framework. Other vignettes of conversation included their favourite sounds, smells and childhood memories – and how these exist to make them the people they are today.
The questions from the audience that followed this conversation yielded a few more delightful anecdotes. Laurie Anderson prescribed a recipe of calcium (milk) and salt (a cracker) for encouraging clear, vivid dreams. She mentioned her time as an artist-in-residence at NASA and her curiosity at their claim that 90% of the universe is invisible. “How do they know it’s not 99%?”, she asked. Doris Lessing spoke of ghosts, and her frustration at friends of hers, otherwise normal, rational people, who had claimed they had seen ghosts. Anderson responded saying she had once seen the ghost of a friend who had just died, yet did not feel any particular fear or emotion because fundamentally she doesn’t believe in ghosts.
In 2007, the second Longplayer conversation took place, this time between David Adjaye, the publicity-savvy leading British cultural architect, and Bruce Mau, the acclaimed Canadian designer, both of whom are well-known to hold strong opinions with little fear of expressing them.
Both Adjaye and Mau at the time were opening new offices in the US, and initially all the talk was towards the first formation of their companies. Mau recalled an interesting story of how he remembered working for Pentagram in London during the 1980’s, and faced strict class structures within the workplace, where there was “a floor for workers, and four steps up, a platform for the bosses”. Adjaye, speaking as an African migrant to the UK, recalled coming from an African culture, where artistic specificity was crucial, and then arriving at a London Art School and being blown away by the openness and expansiveness of the vast array of art they embraced.
Unfortunately Adjaye was at a distinct disadvantage during the discussion. Mau undertook the role of the dominant talker in the conversation, albeit a softly spoken one. As a result, Adjaye barely got a word in, having to sneak in a few points when he was able to, such as questioning a culture that finds expression in the Massive Change project, the exhibition established in 2004 by Mau at the Vancouver Art Gallery, that discussed design as a force for social good.
Sadly, Mau rarely answered or responded to Adjaye’s conversational threads, revealing a distinct problem with the way the event was structured, without either a third person to direct, or a set time limit for each participant, as a means to get the conversation back on track.
Towards the culmination of the discussion, the planned decision to open the floor to the audience was instigated far too late in the debate. Points were mooted, but never carried through for a thorough discussion by Mau and Adjeye. Time simply ran out. Many in the audience quite rightfully felt disappointment at the lack of it not realising its full potential.
Taking place this 12 September at the Royal Geographic Society in London, is this year’s ArtAngel Longplayer Conversation for 2008, which brings together British writer and philosopher Alain de Botton and international financier and philanthropist George Soros.
De Botton was born in Zurich in 1969 and now lives in London. He is a writer of Swiss-Jewish extraction, who pens books which refer both to his own experiences and ideas- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It’s a style of writing that has been termed a ‘philosophy of everyday life.’
His first book, Essays in Love, analysed the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book was unusual, because it mixed elements of a novel together with reflections and analyses normally found in a piece of non-fiction.
His second work, and the one that propelled him to an international audience, ‘How Proust can change your Life’ (1997) proved a notable success abroad, and was founded on the life and works of Marcel Proust.
It was followed by ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’, also an attempt to develop original ideas about friendship, art, envy, desire, and inadequacy, among other things, with the help of thoughts of other thinkers, and like ‘Essays in Love’, was both praised and lambasted for its ‘therapeutic’ approach to philosophy.
Following these two break-through novels, De Botton then returned to a more lyrical, personal style of writing as demonstrated in ‘The Art of Travel’, ‘Status Anxiety’, and his latest book, ‘The Architecture of Happiness’, where he examines beauty in architecture, and how it is related to the well-being and general contentment of the individual and society, describing how architecture affects us every day, even though we rarely pay any real attention to it.
George Soros, in distinct contrast to De Botton, is an international financier and philanthropist, and best known as a successful stock investor and financial speculator.
Born in Budapest in 1930, he survived Nazi occupation, eventually fleeing communist Hungary in 1947 for the UK, where he graduated from the London School of Economics.
He also received significant attention during the infamous ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992 when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, as Britain withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, devaluing its currency. Soros also received media scrutiny in the USA, after contributing more than $20 million to various voter registration and mobilisation programmes in a failed attempt to defeat President George W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 2004.
Soros is now chairman of Soros Fund Management and founder of a network of philanthropic organisations active in more than 50 countries around the world. He is well known for establishing such major philanthropic endeavours promoting the values of democracy and an open society.
The combination of two such distinctive, undeniably driven, yet diametrically opposed individuals, is the key to the Longplayer Conversation’s success. The potential for rigorous and productive debate can only be spawned by bringing together two such enigmatic people, whom have never met, and putting them into a space where they can wax lyrical freely.
Similar to the Longplayer itself, the Longplayer conversation suggests a projection of growth and change and a timescale beyond our lifespans. It was a success in 2005, and a missed affair in 2007, yet the very freedom of debate and ‘no rules’ approach to the discussion is the seed that will bear some prodigious fruit as a result, such as what happened in 2005, or in fact wilt under the power of two conflicting egos such as it did in 2007. Hopefully this year’s discussion proves a rousing success, such as the very first 2005 event that so powerfully marked the birth of the Longplayer Conversation.
