The Longplayer Conversation 2024: Kate Briggs and Daisy Hildyard

Longplayer in partnership with the Swedenborg Society present:

The Longplayer Conversation 2024: Kate Briggs and Daisy Hildyard

Thursday 12 December 2024 | Swedenborg House, London WC1A 2TH

Doors open from 6.30 p.m.

Longplayer Conversation starts at 7.00 p.m.

Longplayer is a one thousand year-long piece of music created by the artist and musician Jem Finer. It began playing at midnight on 31 December 1999, and was composed to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. 

The Longplayer Conversation invites leading cultural and scientific voices to conduct a public discussion inspired by the work’s unique dramatization of time itself, and its kaleidoscopic resonances. This year, as Longplayer approaches the end of its first quarter century, Kate Briggs will be in conversation with Daisy Hildyard: two fiercely original authors working on the politics and poetics of the long form and the long term.

They will discuss the myriad implications of duration and the long view in terms of both writing and living: the complexities of deep time and its unsettling of scales; the insidious nature of slow violence; narrations and rationalizations of the half-understood; and the significance of care-time as a radical form of response, in which writing, translating and friendship act as tactics of attending, handing over and carrying on.

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator. She is the author of This Little Art (2017, an essay on the practice of translation) and The Long Form (2023, a novel). She lives in Rotterdam, NL, where she teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Daisy Hildyard is the author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in York in the north of England.

The evening also heralds the arrival of the much-anticipated issue 0.05 of the Swedenborg Review, featuring essays, photography, fiction, poetry and reviews from writers and artists, including Iain Sinclair, Avery Curran, Jarett Kobek, Sally O’Reilly and Hans Ulrich Obrist, amongst many others. All ticketholders for the Longplayer Conversation can also visit Swedenborg House’s current exhibition, Swedenborg’s Lusthus: Into the Garden, which will have extended opening hours for those attending the Longplayer Conversation.