Please Play!

This is stencilled on the floor on the second floor of the Battery Maritime Building, where David Byrne's 'Playing the Building' is installed for the summer, and you can wait your turn and sit down at an organ whose tendrils extend into the guts of the building. You play the organ, and tickle the building, with motors, pieziometers, and compressed air. It isn't quite music, but it's more than just sound, too. Ultimately, it's an interesting effect, even if it's not quite beautiful. But I love this stencil! It's understated, industrial, and directly instructional. 'This is what you do here.' Like 'look left' on the crosswalks in the UK and Ireland. It's so simple, and almost a part of the building, as opposed to the installation. It's nearly (but not quite) ironic in tone... that you should actually have to tell people to play! Normally, you'd have to tell people to do something ('mind the gap') but here, the sign is telling people to play, which is by definition free-form. Play is open, and permissive. It's as if the sign is telling you to run around the building playing 'tag, you're it' or some other game. At the same time, it's also imploring you... 'please play.' It could have just said 'play,' but that isn't enough somehow. It's too rude like that. No, this isnakt a command, it's a request. Play is what you are to do here, and we very much want you to do it, but, ultimately, it's up to you. Nobody's going to make you do it.