Longplayer is an aspirational sound art piece intended to last a millennium from its inception in 2000. A thousand year sequence of six singing bowl recordings are algorithmically mapped and replayed through a speaker system into the loft of the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse in London.
Conceptually, Longplayer is about hope for the future; reflective and concerned with its own survival in our world, destined to change beyond contemporary recognition or understanding. Like site-specific installations or kinetic works, Longplayer requires constant maintenance, and is therefore a generational asset in trust who are entrusted with its future. To me, it felt reflective of our own mortality. The objects in our lives that will outlive us, contextually changing without us to explain their value or meaning. Trusting the next generation with either taking care of them, or making their own decisions with what to do with our debris.
Being sound, I appreciate that Longplayer can be accessed online from anywhere. Apart from streaming media, visual arts are largely confined to the gallery space, locked down. Steve Connor (2005, p.48) believes that ‘this power of sealing or marooning things in their visibility and this allergy to things that spread that makes art galleries so horribly fatiguing and inhuman’. If Longplayer exists to reach into the future, it concerns all of us, it’s designed to spread and be sonically disseminated. In this way, it is distinctly countering the traditional perceptions of space, as visual arts would occupy it. As beautiful a space as the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse is to house the guts of the piece, the acknowledgment of how all the infrastructure, the technology supporting the piece is temporary is almost more poignant to me. It’s interesting how Finer created a work that has to capably exist independent of a physical element, or be compatible with speculative future technology. It is successful in potentially embodying the purest definition of a sound artwork that I’ve seen; the sound itself and the concept being the only common threads in what I presume to be the many iterations and locations the piece will go through on its journey.
I am often challenged by works where the conceptual idea is arguably more compelling than the actual sound itself. While taking in the intention and understanding how and why Longplayer exists, I found myself at times completely ignoring the ever-present sound. By its very nature, it resides in the background, but I appreciate the aspirational qualities of Longplayer.
In many ways I was reminded of NASA’s Voyager probes, and the famous golden records they contained, intended as humanity’s introductory emissary to extraterrestrial life through sound and image. Both the Voyager probes and Longplayer are aural, sensory-forward summations of our contemporary life, reaching out into a future none living now will see.
The bowls themselves, much like Voyager’s records, engraved with mysterious, near-absurdist donor names and phrases, act as both instruments for live performances of Longplayer and future archaeological finds. The anachronistic meld of the tactile, ancient instrument and futuristic, technological transience is an exciting, successfully multi-faceted contrast.
Connor, S. A talk given in the series Bodily Knowledges: Challenging Ocularcentricity at Tate Modern, 21 February 2003. It has been published in FO A RM, 4 (2005), 48-57.