OKAY

In 2002, the Danish Architects Association, in cooperation with the Municipality of Aarhus, invited 10 young architects from Aarhus to design a poster presenting their own work. The exhibition was to take place in the actual cityscape, from 1 July to 31 July, on a selected number of the city MUPI's - an advertising stand with advertising on one side, and local information on the other - developed by AFA JCDecaux.

Our contributed was the project Okay – a project aimed at challenging the way we discuss the city and the planning of urban spaces. The content of our poster was a sort of user guide for the project itself. But the project went beyond the poster and invited the viewer to enter an Internet address where the user had the opportunity to expand the reach of the poster as a communication medium. The poster was a pattern (the black frame with the text okay) that can be recognized by a webcam and a PC by installing a piece of software from the website. Basically the same approach, which is today used in QR codes but at the time was a novel way of mixing the physical and digital space, augmenting the public space and creating a new ‘room’ for debate.

As part of AFA JCDecaux agreement with the Municipality of Aarhus they had obtained the rights to, and a de facto monopoly on the public space in an invisible radius of 20m around each MUPI in the physical world. Our project was also a challenge aimed at this monopoly, asking the question whether this monopoly also extended into the digital space surrounding the MUPI.