A few years ago, Byrne repurposed an abandoned U.S. Army clubhouse on Governors Island as a rehearsal space for “Theater of the Mind,” an immersive experience about the plasticity of cognition, which recently completed a run at York Street Yards, in Denver, and which will open in Chicago in March. Byrne thinks a lot about the psychogeography of New York City and its abandoned places. In 2008, he transformed an empty hangar at the ferry terminal into a booming and dissonant musical instrument, an installation that he called “Playing the Building.” “I had an idea that I could mechanically make sounds from the infrastructure of an old building—exposed pipes, exposed radiators, girders that support things, whatever,” he said. He had gutted an old pump organ and retrofitted the keys so that they activated various mechanical devices. There was no amplification beyond the terminal’s own strange acoustics. Visitors were invited to mess around with the organ as they pleased. “Hit this key and a hammer comes down and blows air through a pipe—hit a different key, something else happens,” he said. “People would come and say, ‘I’m not a musician,’ then they’d see little kids start to play, and go, ‘Well, if they can do it, then I can do it.’ I thought it would be about revealing the inherent sound of the building, but once it was installed I realized, no, it’s actually about the people, about enabling creativity.”