Play Me, I'm Yours

01/07/09

Posted by Rachel

Eating my lunch in Soho Square today I was entertained by a gentleman playing jazz piano in the sunshine. This is not a usual occurrence. Recently, some artistic soul had delivered pianos to pedestrian hubs all over the city, from the London Stock Exchange to the Millennium Bridge in the shadow of St Paul’s, where a lady was playing alone at 3am last Sunday morning. The pianos are inscribed with the invitation ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’. It made me wonder how exactly Luke Jerram decided where to put these instruments. Are the locations entirely random? One look at this map suggests otherwise - http://www.streetpianos.com/london2009/ On his website he says that “the pianos act as sculptural, musical, blank canvas's (sic) that become a reflection of the communities they are embedded into”. But even a blank canvas tells us something about the person who hung it in that particular spot.

How we map our worlds is fascinating. The pianos dotting the city at the moment provide us with an insight into Luke’s personal map of London, but what do other people’s maps look like? Every map-maker has to make a choice about which areas are important and which can be left out. Arguably we are all doing this. Have you ever tried to give someone directions, only to find that while your own world map consists of statues or parks, theirs is based around cafes and pubs? Or that whilst they know where all the tube stations are, they couldn’t point south towards the river? While your average Ordinance Survey maps the physical reality, we also map our own realities in a personal and social sense. These individual maps often tell you a lot more about a person than you would initially imagine.