All the letters can be found on the letters page.

Longplayer conversation 2013: Richard Holloway and Richard Mabey from Artangel on Vimeo.

Mabey is a celebrated writer about nature and our relationship to it. His most recent books include Turned Out Nice Again, Living With the Weather and Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants.

Holloway, a writer, broadcaster and self-proclaimed ‘agnostic Christian’, was formerly Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church until he stood down in 2000. His books include the memoir Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt and Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition.

The talk took place at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD on Thursday 31 October 2013.

Mabey is a celebrated writer about nature and our relationship to it. His most recent books include Turned Out Nice Again, Living With the Weather and Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants. Holloway, a writer, broadcaster and self-proclaimed ‘agnostic Christian’, was formerly Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church until he stood down in 2000. His books include the memoir Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt and Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition.

The talk will take place at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD beginning at 7pm on Thursday 31 October 2013.
Admission is £10 (£8 concessions).

To book visit www.artangel.org.uk

Artangel and the Longplayer Trust are inviting thinkers and writers from a wide variety of disciplines to engage in a chain of written correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. Unfolding slowly over time, the Artangel Longplayer Letters will form a written conversation in which each conversant is both answering his or her predecessor and thinking toward his or her successor – it is a dialogical relay, very much in the spirit of the Long Conversations.

The letters are also be available on the Artangel and the Long Now websites.

Each tier of the structure, containing 39 bowls positioned sequentially, corresponds to one of the six concentric rings of the Longplayer Live instrument.

Photograph by James Whitaker

Longplayer Live London 2009 : 1000 seconds from Longplayer on Vimeo.

For more information about naming bowls and supporting Longplayer visit this page.

Many thanks to David Jennings.

“On reaching the corner of Greenwich Park, a quiet suburban district, the police had found, amid a motley debris of trees, bushes and railings, the charred and shattered remains of a man.” Newspaper report, 1894. “Wait till they start on the Greenwich Observatory. London without time will cause them to wake up.” Suffragette conversation, 1913.

David Rooney is currently a curator at the Science Museum and formerly curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, and was involved in the installation of Longplayer listening posts at both museums. He is interested in the roles played by material artefacts in long-term institutional survival strategies, and the ways people can seek to destabilise experiments in normalisation.

Conversations and events are now archived here, along with an audio recording of this talk.

Further documentation, from this and other talks, will be posted before long.

“Kötting hauled a plastic swan, a lure, as we walked. We were accompanied by a pair of mature students from the art college where he taught: one of them had got himself into shape for this by completing the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and the other kept a record with a pinhole camera made from a Swan Vesta matchbox. Random encounters calibrated our progress.”

Iain Sinclair 2010

www.swandown.info

Conversations and events are now archived here, along with an audio recording of this talk.