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Quantum Ouija began as a Meme that was converted into a 2d graphic. The idea became collaboration between two friends who met in Architecture School at the University of New Mexico in the 1970’s. Prior to meeting each had spent summers during the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s growing up at their respective family camps in the Adirondacks. Camps and places with deep rooted family histories, Adirondack style homes, and surrounded by vast areas of open wilderness. Their family camps were only about 40 miles apart as a crow flies, yet at the time they hadn’t known each other until they later met in College and learned of this coincidental connection. Each summer they would journey to their respective camps to hike, fish, and visit with grandparents, family and friends from earliest childhood on to adulthood, as their parents had before them. When they became friends in the 1970’s each was surprised to compare the similarities of their respective upbringings and Adirondack experiences likening them to a kind of “Walkabout” or right of passage along the path of growing up.
The idea arose when one of the Architects recalled a fond memory of his Adirondack experience when his Grandmother once brought out an old Ouija board on a very rainy day in lieu of the usual board games of the time. As she set things up and they started moving the Planchette across the board she asked if they could speak with her then deceased brother, Great Uncle Sammy. The Architect was 7 years old at the time and had only a vague memory of his Great Uncle who had passed on some year’s prior. He thought a lot about this concept of communication with a dead relative using a drawing with symbols on a board while participating in this mystical process with his Grandmother. Ouija came to be a regular choice that would be played along with his Grandmother and brothers out of the selection of board games on those sometimes rainy summer days while stuck inside their cabin in the Adirondacks.
Making drawings and symbols on boards turned out to be something that both Architects would be doing a lot of later on and each recalled the popularity of Ouija during that era. They recalled in their early studies in Architecture on learning how to think conceptually and holistically when approaching a new design problem. From that perspective one can then establish a “design intent", a term used extensively in the field of practice. That opened a discussion about “Intention” as being something tangible beyond the abstract that is somehow inherent or recorded in an architectural drawing, and for that matter in any image, symbol, music, art, etc.
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