Talk at Future Forest, Hooke Park, Architectural Association

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I’m very much looking forward to talking at Hooke Park this Friday for the Future Forest. It’s a great array of speakers encompassing scientists, foresters, architects, curators and artists. Information on tickets (including travel to the Dorset location are available below).

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FUTURE FOREST

7th Nov  | Hooke Park | 11.30 - 17.30 

Future Forest is a one-day multidisciplinary event set within the 140 hectare working woodland at Hooke Park, the Architectural Association’s rural campus in Dorset. Bringing together voices from forestry, ecology, art and architecture, the day explores how creative and scientific practices can co-evolve in the age of climate emergency. 

The morning grounds us in the technical and ecological — with talks from forestry and silviculture experts. This is centred around the future of forestry and the AA Wood Lab’s 100 Year Forest Project - a framework for the long-term management of the working forest at Hooke Park. In the afternoon, the conversation expands to explore how artistic and speculative practices can shape our understanding of environmental and ecological futures.

Tickets for the event are free, tickets including cooked lunch are £7

For anyone coming from London there’s also an option to book a free shuttle bus from Dorchester South and back.

More info here: 

www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogramme/whatson/future-forest

Direct link to book tickets here: 

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/future-forest-tickets-1794615135179?aff=oddtdtcreator

Living Symphonies in 'Lost for Words' at Sheffield Doc Fest

Lost for Words, a feature documentary directed by Hannah Papacek Harper will be shown at Sheffield International Documentary Festival this June. The film features the forest-based sound artwork Living Symphonies by Jones/Bulley.

More about Lost for Words here.

More about Living Symphonies here.

Longplayer article on the Quietus

An article in the Quietus yesterday about Longplayer:

What becomes clear as we talk is that Longplayer is not a passive work but rather a challenge, a sort of quest in time and space. In Zoroastrian culture, they keep Fire Temples where the flames have not gone out for hundreds of years. Successive generations must tend to them and in doing so the culture survives. In Japan, the Ise Shrine is torn down periodically and rebuilt. This is an act of seeming madness to the capitalist utilitarian worldview, but genius as it forces people to retain the knowledge of how to build wooden temples as well as embodying ideas of transience and the cyclical nature of life. It has done so for at least 1000 years. Longplayer possesses a similar spirit, “There is this social side, with people taking responsibility for looking after it,” Finer says. “It goes back to the Hackney Empire in a way. The embodiment of tradition and responsibility, and how it replenishes itself.”  Future custodians will be keeping something alive then that is both tangible and intangible – a piece of music, or music itself, an idea, a way of life, a lifeform, or a form of communion. 

Darran Anderson, The Quietus
3 April 2025

To support and hear Longplayer you can purchase the app available here.

For more about the project please visit the Longplayer website.

Longplayer Installation at Trinity Buoy Wharf
Photograph: James Whitaker

Performing in Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse

I’m hugely looking forward to performing as part of Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse, London on 5 April 2025. The performance of 1000 minutes of Longplayer’s score is 0720–midnight and celebrates the 25th birthday of Longplayer.

You can find tickets and further information here, and a lot more about Longplayer itself here.

“Spend one unique day with Longplayer, live at the Roundhouse.

A 1000-year-long piece of music, Longplayer has been playing continuously since the first moments of this millennium and is composed to continue until the final moments of the next.

On 5th April 2025, Longplayer will return to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.

Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.

Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.

Audiences can spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and are invited to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.

Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 18 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community will join the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.

Longplayer Live is generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management. Thanks is also due to Universal Works for their generosity in supporting, designing and making the performers’ clothing.”

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Jem Finer

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino