A Wave Inside the Ad Slot: COEX K-POP Square, Seoul, and a'strict's WAVE (2020)

Get off Line 2 of the Seoul Metro at Samseong station, take exit 6, and you will surface at the north corner of COEX in Seoul's Gangnam district. The building on the corner is SMTown COEX Artium, the flagship media venue of the K-pop label SM Entertainment. The upper portion of its L-shaped façade is wrapped, almost entirely, in a single curved LED screen. Most of the time, the surface runs the usual rotation of a premium DOOH (digital out-of-home) inventory: K-pop music videos, automobile spots, cosmetic commercials, tourism board promotions. Then, once an hour, for a single minute, a different kind of time cuts in.

A giant transparent tank appears on the surface of the LED. Inside it, a mass of blue water hurls itself against the wall, throws spray into the air, and settles again — at which point the next advertisement returns. In April 2020, a method for deliberately reserving one minute of "not-advertising" inside a contemporary DOOH programming schedule, and placing a work inside that slot, was broadcast from this single corner of Seoul. The work is titled WAVE. The artist credit reads a'strict; the operating company is d'strict. This essay sets down a record of that one minute, along three axes: the device, the programming, and the lineage.

Lineage — From a Web Agency, 2004

d'strict was founded in Seoul in 2004, originally as a web agency. Around 2009 it shifted toward a digital agency model, following the evolution of displays and interfaces, and gradually broadened its production scope toward digital content that could be deployed in offline space. Sean Lee (Lee Sung-ho) joined the management nucleus in 2007 and took the CEO position in 2016. The company name d'strict is a portmanteau of design + strictly, and the constant maintenance of a quality standard for the content it produces sits at the core of the business.

What matters here is that the artist credit on WAVE is not d'strict but a'strict. a'strict is an open art collective of digital and media artists, drawn from both inside and outside the company, organised so that more non-commercial, authorial work can be made alongside the commercial production that d'strict itself handles. Sang Jin Lee, a vice president at the company, told the curation magazine Wallpaper* that WAVE was the project with the largest reach in the company's history, and located the reason as follows.

Among our projects, WAVE was the most popular. I think it came from the unexpectedness of the artwork in the middle of the city.

— Wallpaper*source

The recognition, in other words, is that being inserted into a commercial site is itself the core of the work. This self-awareness flows directly into the operational design of the "programming slot inside the advertising rotation" that the rest of this essay will describe.

The Discovery of the L-Surface

The upper LED of SMTown COEX Artium measures, according to d'strict's own work description, 80.1 metres wide by 20.1 metres tall. It curves around the corner of the building so that, viewed from a position fixed in front of the façade, the two adjacent faces are perceived as a single continuous interior wall.

This L-shaped surface turns out to be decisively advantageous for anamorphic staging. If one tries to draw a three-dimensional illusion on a flat LED, the position of the viewer is subject to a strict constraint, and the depicted object ends up functioning, fundamentally, as an "image pressed flat against the screen." The moment two surfaces fold at a right angle, however — once the viewer's vantage point is fixed — it becomes possible to fabricate the depth of the picture inside the picture itself. Instead of perceiving the wave as "leaping forward out of the surface," the viewer perceives "a tank standing behind the surface." The blue water of WAVE rises inside exactly that fabricated tank, and breaks across the far side of the L.

Physically, this is among the largest high-resolution outdoor LEDs in the world. As an affiliated facility of SM Entertainment, SMTown COEX Artium functions as a flagship media exposure device for K-pop, and in normal operation runs as premium DOOH inventory for music video promotions, automotive launches, cosmetics, and tourism boards. To carve out one minute, every hour, from a slot whose commercial value as advertising inventory is extraordinarily high, and to dedicate that minute to a work, is the box-office heart of what WAVE accomplished.

A Programming Slot Inside the Advertising Slot

Sean Lee, in a 2020 interview with the local English daily The Korea Times, stated the motive simply.

The large-format outdoor display is mostly used for advertisements and other commercial projects. However, we thought of the public characteristics of the giant LED display as people would see it while walking down the street. So we came up with the public media art of the waves for everyone.

— The Korea Timessource

The claim deserves careful reading. The argument here is not that the advertising slot should be replaced by an art slot. Commercial use is left in place as the operating premise. On top of that premise, the public character of the LED as it appears to people walking down the street — who are pedestrians before they are anyone's customers — is identified as a separate editorial subject. A non-commercial slot was deliberately written into a commercial rotation.

d'strict, in its own work metadata, restates this stance in still more explicitly business-oriented terms.

We aim to develop numerous attractive visual content that can be licensed into any size and shape of the screen consistently.

— d'strict — ART CONTENTSsource

This is at once an artist statement and a definition of the work as a licensed product. WAVE is not designed as a one-off site-specific commission but as IP content that can be licensed to outdoor LED media. The series name "Public Media Art" is the banner of this approach; WAVE is positioned as the first work in that series (#1). The same inventory model on which advertisers buy time becomes the model on which outdoor media owners rent "work time" — and this is, in this journal's recurring formulation, the first commercially viable implementation of the structure of "placing a work inside the empty time of a distribution infrastructure."

The Spread of the Anamorphic Method

The official YouTube upload of WAVE is dated April 2020; the media campaign followed in May. The footage of a "water mass rising on a street corner" exploded across social platforms at exactly the moment that COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions were emptying streets worldwide. The direct downstream effects were visible quickly. In June 2021, the 3D giant cat on Cross Shinjuku Vision began operation at the east exit of Shinjuku station; from 2022 onward, the 3D panda animations on the L-shaped LED at Chengdu IFS / Taikoo Li became a regular fixture. Each of these is an implementation of the same structural triad — an L-shaped surface, an anamorphic image, a reserved slot inside the schedule — that WAVE established.

d'strict itself exported the method as a series. In July 2021, in collaboration with Samsung Electronics, the company deployed Waterfall-NYC across the tower-side LEDs of One Times Square. Four vertical LEDs lined up next to each other are treated as the wall of a tall waterfall, and a fictional basin and rock face are inserted into the Times Square intersection.

The path that runs from Seoul into the major intersections of New York, Tokyo, and Chengdu makes clear that d'strict is conducting a serial export of the method, not a serial export of the work. The reproducibility is held at the level of method rather than artefact. The strength of a production model built on licensing shows up exactly at this layer.

A Branching Path — ARTE MUSEUM

In September 2020, the same year WAVE was released, d'strict opened a permanent immersive media-art venue on Jeju Island, ARTE MUSEUM, under the theme "Eternal Nature" — large-scale LED and projection environments built around natural motifs: wave, waterfall, forest, desert, sky. a'strict's first solo gallery exhibition, Starry Beach, opened the same month at Kukje Gallery in Seoul.

Laid out chronologically, WAVE (outdoor, public), Starry Beach (gallery), and ARTE MUSEUM (permanent venue) were all released within the same year. This is not coincidence. It is the visible shape of a business design in which a method established outdoors is extended to more controlled environments as well. In the same Korea Times interview, Sean Lee explained that the concept of ARTE MUSEUM had existed before WAVE, and that the theme of "Eternal Nature" branched into a number of separate projects.

ARTE MUSEUM has since expanded to Yeosu, Gangneung, Busan, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York, and now sits alongside Atelier des Lumières and teamLab Borderless as one of the international chains of indoor immersive venues. Outdoor and indoor, advertising and ticketed exhibition, licensed and owned — the same "Public Media Art" method continues to be implemented along divergent commercial paths simultaneously.

Ma and Tenkei

Read against this journal's vocabulary, the case becomes more legible. The LED at SMTown COEX is a typical piece of broad DOOH infrastructure, run on a daily basis as part of a citywide advertising inventory; the hourly rotation is, quite literally, "time governed by the ad-server." Into that schedule, d'strict cut out one minute. The act is a placement of a work inside the temporal ma — the interval, in Japanese aesthetic vocabulary — of the infrastructure: a single perforation, made along the time axis, that holds a different editorial principle from the advertising chain on either side of it.

The differential lies in the ownership question. When a distribution operator that holds its own inventory programs artworks inside that inventory, the editorial act is contained within a closed pipeline. d'strict, by contrast, made this kind of programming work against outdoor LED media it does not own, by licensing the work as IP. The first model carries the vessel along with the contents; the second supplies only the contents. Both, however, are characteristic tenkei operations — operations that rediscover the "frame inside the frame" as an editorial subject.

The one minute in which a water mass stood up on a corner in Gangnam, in April 2020, was a proof of concept: an editorial slot can exist on the timeline of ad-supported DOOH. The wave of 3D illusion signage that has continued across intersections worldwide since is a repetition of that proof. A non-advertising moment, rising up here and there like a point in a landscape — a tenkei, the small figure that gives life to a landscape painting — pulls the city, by small increments, toward the museum side. WAVE deserves to be remembered as the first such work.

Sources

1. fig.001PUBLIC MEDIA ART 'WAVE' by a'strict
2. fig.002PUBLIC MEDIA ART 'Waterfall-NYC' by a'strict
3. [3]d’strict — Official Site
4. [4]blooloop,d'strict: where art and nature meet technology
5. [5]The Korea Times,Design company d’strict makes splash in art gallery
6. [6]Wallpaper*,a’strict: the South Korean digital art collective bringing nature to urban life
7. [7]designboom,d’strict projects an endless simulated wave on massive LED screens in south korea
8. [8]urdesignmag,Coex Wave Installation, Seoul, South Korea / d’strict
9. [9]CNN Style,SMTown COEX: Giant 3D wave sweeps over South Korea’s Gangnam District
10. [10]COEX K-POP Square — VisitSeoul Official

Operations Record

OPERATOR

d'strict (operation), under the artist name a'strict

LOCATION

Seoul

MODEL

Ad-slot takeover — Reserves one non-advertising minute per hour within SMTown COEX Artium's premium DOOH rotation; the method is licensed on to other cities

CADENCE

One minute per hour, running since the April 2020 premiere

SPEC

An L-shaped curved LED, 80.1 × 20.1 m, used for anamorphic depth illusions from a fixed viewpoint

SINCE

2020-04

STATUS

Active

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