The Long Player Conversation 2021 Timothy Morton and Denise Ferreira da Silva
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-12-08

The Longplayer Conversations are a long running series that take long term thinking as a starting point for different trajectories of thought and action.

This year’s edition brings together two of the most important thinkers and cultural activists of our age Denise Ferreira da Silva and Timothy Morton for what promises to be a fascinating conversation, informed by their profound engagement with ecology, race and social justice.

Through the lens of Longplayer, a 1000 year long piece of music, they discuss moving towards a global equity in human and non-human relations and how the Black Lives Matter movement is key to a properly green and socially sustainable future.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Dívida Impagavel (2019), Unpayable Debt (2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event and The Black Scholar. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), v4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and feature (essays and interviews) in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux.

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Described in the Guardian in 2017 as ‘the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene’, Morton has written extensively at the intersection of culture, ecology and philosophy, including Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (2021), All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010) and Ecology without Nature (2007). Morton has collaborated with numerous artists including on Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges and as author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton’s work has been translated into 11 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

Longplayer is a continuous piece of music repeating once every 1000 years. Commissioned by Artangel and created by artist Jem Finer, Longplayer has been playing to the public for free since the start of the millennium. Each year, it has around 100,000 listeners from more than 160 countries worldwide. Longplayer can be heard at temporary listening posts around the world, through the Longplayer iOS app, as well as online at www.longplayer.org.

The Longplayer Trust exists to explore the themes set up by the artwork through talks, events and happenings, including the Longplayer Conversation. Previous Longplayer conversations have included David Attenborough, Brian Eno, Doris Lessing and James Lovelock.