Ouija Board Seance

In October of 2021, Leslie Liu and I designed a set of three posters promoting a ouija board seance hosted by the St. Louis Paranormal Research Society.

After we were inspired by Moniker’s Your Line or Mine and Clement Valla’s Mechanical Turk Alphabets, our design came about as a product of our shared obsessions: minimalism, esoterica, conditional variability, and multimedia performance.

Ouija Board Seance isn’t legible as a poster at first: it’s a wall of atoms, and potential comprehension demanded didactic instruction and eye-straining labor on the part of an audience that could have easily ignored us. But we found that participants quickly became captivated by the process, and the excitement our strange poster generated helped overcome the frictive dense text and austere visuality.

The posters are built using two randomized groups of unique illustrated glyphs. One set is replicated on a custom made wooden die, the other is not. We designed a simple poster containing event information for the seance in black type on a flat white background, and converted the vector image of that design into a pixel grid.

Each “black” pixel was converted to instead display a random glyph from the first group. Then, the negative space “white” pixels were replaced with random glyphs from the second group.

We filled three large posters with the resulting tens of thousands of tiny hieroglyphs, and set them up for interaction in key spots near Lemp Brewery and the Washington University campus.

Passerby were encouraged to roll the die, investigate the poster, and then--using a selection of heavy dark markers--black out their fatefully chosen glyph.

In the end, because only the first group of glyphs were able to be blacked out, our crowd sourced poster gradually emerged from the cryptic wall of text.