The Artangel Longplayer Conversation
John Lanchester and Caitlin Moran
Last year, the Artangel Longplayer Conversation paired journalist and novelist John Lanchester (Capital and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay) with writer and broadcaster Caitlin Moran (How To Be a Woman, Moranthology). An annual event celebrating Jem Finer's thousand-year long Artangel commission Longplayer, the conversation invites two cultural thinkers to engage in a dialogue that contemplates present positions and possible futures with a long term view.
The inaugural meeting in 2005 was between New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson and Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing. Other thinkers have included British architect David Adjaye and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton, Canadian designer Bruce Mau and Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist George Soros. In 2009, to mark Longplayer's 10th anniversary, Artangel presented Longplayer Live – a 12-hour talking marathon of 24 cultural figures – and a live performance at London's Roundhouse – a 1000 minute section from its 1000 year duration.
Longplayer is a thousand-year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on 31 December 1999 and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust. Longplayer can be heard in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, where it has been playing since it began. It can also be heard at several other listening posts around the world, and globally via a live stream [M3U / Tunein] on the Internet.
Ticket information
Tickets for this event have now sold out but a live video stream will be available on The Guardian website.
The talk begins at 7pm on Monday 3 December 2012.
Admission is £10 (£8 concessions)
The address is RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD [map]
Public Enquiries: T. +44 (0)20 7713 1400
Web streaming and production by Kinura.
About 2012's Longplayer Conversationalists
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where his pieces still appear. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written four novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips, Fragrant Harbour and Capital and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, a book about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into 25 languages.
Caitlin Moran was born in 1975 and is a writer, critic, broadcaster and columnist. At 15 she won the Observer's Young Reporter of the Year and by16 she'd joined Melody Maker, the music weekly. At 18, she presented the pop show Naked City on Channel 4. She went on to become a columnist at The Times, both as a TV critic and the Friday column 'Celebrity Watch', winning the British Press Awards Columnist of the Year 2010, and Critic and Interviewer of the Year 2011. She has written three books; The Chronicles of Narmo, the award-winning How To Be a Woman and most recently, Moranthology.
Watch, listen to or read about previous Artangel Longplayer Conversations:
2011: John Gray & James Lovelock
18 April 2011 at RIBA, Portland Place, London
[Watch] [Listen] ... or [Read] a response from futurist Mark Stevenson
2009: The Long Conversation
12 September 2009 at The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London
(a 12-hour talking marathon with Jeanette Winterson, Susie Orbach, Sophie Fiennes, Mark Miodownik, Cory Doctorow, Ruth Padel, Lewis Wolpert, Charles Arsène-Henry, Mark Lythgoe, Bonnie Greer, Marcus du Sautoy, Robert Peston, Steven Rose, Lisa Jardine, Andrew Kötting, David Toop, Mark Haddon, Rachel Armstrong and Vincent Walsh)
[Listen]
2005: Doris Lessing and Laurie Anderson
26 May 2005 at the Royal Institution, London
[Listen]