Spooky Action
Variable-weight typeface drawn from the segments of the pentagram hidden within the New Haven Green’s network of footpaths created by Stewart Smith.
Spooky Action was first drawn during Stewart Smith's artist residency while designing the site-specific public art piece, “Beneath the Green, the Quantum”, exhibited on the New Haven Green for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Our artwork interleaved the inviting strangeness of quantum computing with the eerie history of the Green itself. (This Green-inspired typeface was one of several smaller, satellite pursuits of his residency.)
While choosing which section of the Green to exhibit our piece on, we began to narrow in on the Lower Green’s southern quadrant—and noticed that its walkways, when combined with the flagpole, created an imperfect pentagram—a symbol of several curious meanings. Spooky Action began as an impromptu game of sorts: Could a full alphabet be constructed using only the walkway segments within this quadrant of the Green? Numerals as well? The idea had a stickiness while lacking any sort of purposefulness.
In ascribing a moniker to this typeface, I broke a cardinal rule among quantum practitioners with more knowledge and refinement than I’ll achieve: Never utter the word “spooky.” Albert Einstein’s one-time withering description of quantum physics as “spooky action at a distance” continues to haunt the field through its misinterpretation, and frequent deployment in poorly researched pop-science pulp.
The New Haven Green occupies the heart of New Haven’s original nine-square city plan, where thousands of unmarked graves lurk just beneath the footfalls of its unsuspecting pedestrians. Puritan settlers of the 1600s carefully sized this center square for a capacity of 144,000 occupants—the number of souls to be spared one day when their undead leader returns from outer space to murder humanity. Criss-crossed walking paths inscribe the Green’s surface with the uneven pentagram that serves as a peculiar grid for this geometric typeface.
According to “Chronicles of New Haven Green” (1898, p.255) the Green served as the main burial grounds for the residents of New Haven during its first 150 years, but by 1821 the practice was abolished and many of the headstones were moved to the nearby Grove Street Cemetery. However, the dead were not moved, and thus still remain beneath the surface of the Green. It is conservatively estimated that between 4,000 and 5,000 residents remain entombed and unmarked within the soil of this public park.
The unnerving sense that New Haven’s Green is spooky, the fact that my physical presence on the Green—and this particular quadrant of it—was entirely due to an art collaboration with the good folks of Yale University’s Quantum Institute, and that the observation of this pentagram grid is only properly made from a distance above (in this case, via Google Maps’ satellite imagery). If ever there were cause for a pun… I don’t claim that “Spooky Action” is a terribly good name for a typeface—or that I even enjoy it as a name at all. But I didn’t choose it. It chose itself.
