Why SF is covered with posters about pigeons and banning babies

Donning matching white jumpsuits and armed with a stack of papers and rolls of tape, Laura Ogle and Jason Reichl marched through the Mission on a recent Friday evening, putting up flyers. 

On this particular outing, their bright pink posters advertise a “Memory Market” with “deals, deals, deals,” where “every memory must go.” It’s not their first campaign: If you’ve walked past a telephone pole in San Francisco this year, you may have noticed some of their prior (and similarly mischievous) work, too, drumming up support for banning babies on Valencia Street or searching for people willing to train for the “job of the future” as a pigeon postmaster. 

“There are a lot more people than we thought who are hungry for oddity or hungry for something that will break them out of their daily routine,” Ogle said. And she and Reichl aim to deliver it. 

The duo has launched what could be described as an immersive art project, community experience or interactive game — and perhaps it’s a hybrid of all three. Each time someone engages with one of their posters, either through texting, calling or filling out a survey, they’ll eventually be prompted to take another step.

Dubbed People on a Mission — “A group of concerned citizens fighting against the end of society” — its goal is to shake people up, sparking both delight and deeper conversations. 

“So much of the narrative around San Francisco makes it feel like a lost place, and that we’re all helpless and hopeless,” Ogle said. “There’s an aspect of People on a Mission that is about trying to encourage societal engagement — just getting people to talk about things, regardless of what those things may be — and using absurdity to get people to think about how we can co-create society together in a way that is more beneficial to us all, rather than just languishing in the void of ‘Everything sucks.’”

Their pigeon postmaster campaign tried to recruit people to ditch their cell phones and embrace winged communication. The project about banishing infants, meanwhile, prompted silly voicemails, serious voicemails and voicemails from folks who wanted to keep the conversation going. The duo uses a mix of automation and personalization to respond in a way that allows someone to be pulled in deeper if they want to keep exploring. 

Ogle and Reichl, who both have backgrounds in art, have been impressed by the scope of respondents so far. And they’re hoping to engage many more: Unlike more secretive and mysterious counterculture experiences like the Jejune Institute, People on a Mission wants to make it easy for anyone curious to come on board. 

“The only barrier to entry is your willingness to engage,” Reichl said. “If you want to be involved, we want you to. And you can engage on different levels.”

For example, anyone who responded to one of the posters about the aforementioned Memory Market was prompted to meet at a designated location with an object that carried a story that they’d be willing to share. People could give away their memories and trade for those from others or just read all the stories. A steady stream of people stopped by all day, Ogle said. 

“The biggest compliment that we’ve gotten is that we’ve had numerous people tell us that it feels like ‘old San Francisco,’” she said. While the duo didn’t set out for that comparison, they do see their game as paying reverence to the city’s history as a hub for artists and weirdos, according to Ogle: “San Francisco is its own player, its own kind of driving force. San Francisco informs a lot of what we’ve built.”