David Claerbout's work Shadow Piece opens the view from the inside to the outside, from the house to the street. Streets and houses shape the city. The city is a space. Michel de Certeau describes space as "a web of movable elements. It is to a certain extent filled by the totality of the movements that unfold within it. It is therefore a result of activities that give it a direction, that temporalize it." [1] This result doesn't yet define identity and unity; the city manifests itself as "a single mass of pedestrians..., a web of slapdash, out‑of‑the‑way accommodations, a traversing of your assumed own places and a universe of rented places, which are beset by a non‑place or dreamed‑up places." [2] Our concepts are not clear. Do place and space stand in relation to each other like house and place to the street, like standing‑still to going on, like the closed to the open? Does the place at first seem to us to be something stable and motionless, only a point at which we come to a halt and where we linger? But as soon as something happens at the location and with the location, i.e., a movement, it expands, becomes a space that leads to other spaces. Places have the most diverse functions. They divide up the protected area I can retreat to. They are also public zones that I share with others, places where I meet confidants just as much as places that are transitory and anonymous. Places can be places of passage, transit rooms, railway stations, ticket offices, where people pass each other, where they disperse to other parts of the city via a network of streets. The city is not merely a sequence of places and not a static geometry of streets. It is, repeatedly, a newly created movement in time and space, in which the different processes of walking come together: the goal‑oriented, or meandering and strolling walk, walking around, passing‑by, lingering. The city happens. In a fancy‑free stroll through Paris, the French situationists à la Guy Debord created another, open structure of experience, i.e., their own changing topography of the city beyond any fixed plan. The activity of pedestrians who take over the city space generates an urban network, provides the city with energy and determines its velocity. The reality of growing cities encompasses both the sedentary and the nomadic. It's a reality that can bear me up or isolate me. A café, a street, a quarter are familiar to me, but at the next corner I am already a stranger. The city is like an organism, which is held together in some way or other that I cannot really make out. In order to move around in the city, I have to constantly tear up my roots; in walking, I disengage myself from a place and fail to reach it. Some live in the city; they remain, they wait, have in fact not arrived, remain underway.

In her four‑channel video installation A Needle Woman from 2000‑2001 (Fig. p. 110/111), Kimsooja stands with her back to the viewer as a stationary, vertical axis in the heart of four metropolises: Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos and London, in a stream of people who meet her and go past her. At first the viewer takes in the waves of intermingling passersby, the continuum of urban life, into which the artist has plunged. In the midst of the mass movement, the artist appears, in her own words, to be a "barometer", a "witness", a "compass", a "surveying pin" that records the different cultures. [3] Like a pin, she pricks into the colorful social tissue of the cities, sews different societies together. [4] Kimsooja sees the pin as an extension of her body; she overcomes in‑between spaces and disappears again. The thread remains as a binding and mediating trace of the ghost in the tissue's weave. [5]

The fact that people always move in the same way seems to blend cities into a global unconcern in which the artist surfaces at random, alternating locations, but a closer look also shows peoples' social identities in differing hierarchies, classes, relations to each other, different reactions to the artist that are noted or avoided and ignored. In London's cosmopolitan bustle, people walk around self‑engrossed, unreceptive, single‑minded. In Lagos they react with curiosity, laughter, irritation. In one city, Kimsooja becomes transparent, almost vanishes; in the other she appears as a counterpart. She is both present and absent, part of the cities' space and time and outside of that space and that time. She obviously stands in the way as a physical impediment and yet her physical existence is ignored. She meets the others and is isolated; she is divided from the life of the others and in the same way integrated in the passage of that Iife. The viewer looks at the back of the artist, takes up her position and also that of the people who go past her, tries to imagine Kimsooja's face that radiates self‑confidence and the safety in staying within the flow of passing life. Even when she is a perceived object, her inner nature remains closed to the others. She is the observer as such, not only of what happens around her, but also of the processes that go on inside her.

The speed of the video has been reduced by 50 percent. By means of this prolongation, time, the artist's encounters, the flow of people, stationary and fleeting time -all are more intensely experienced. The artist is the indicator of time and space; both make up a unit, both are physical. "Although, when I place my motionless body in space as a vertical axis, I create a form of timelessness, I simultaneously open up another movement: it is a vertical movement directed inwards; time in the form of consolidation. We cannot separate the coexistence of time and corporeality and therefore of spatiality; they will always belong together." [6] A Needle Woman thus transmits three perceptions of time, standing still in the body of the artist in which past, present and future meet, which, in comparison and despite the slowdown, incorporates the visible speed of the other passing figures plus the perspective of the viewers, who stand respectively for real‑time.

Kimsooja, on the one hand, opposes the acceleration of life; her motionlessness highlights the floundering, empty movement and temporal mechanism of the human stream around her. But it is also possible to see this the other way around. In this case the unceasing, endless wave of people is the stationary and enduring part and the artist is the existence that is in motion, will go on, pass away, decompose and disappear. Kimsooja speaks of the finitude and infinity of being. We are in time and timeless; we are transient and without any durable substance and thus also have access to and an experience of delimitation, of transcendence or going beyond time.

Although the nomadic lifestyle is a characteristic phenomena of this era, it could also be one's choice; we can still live without moving around much and be rooted in one's own place. Human curiosity and the desire for communication expands its physical dimension and happens to control human relationships and the desire for possessions, and pursuing the establishment of a global community, which includes the virtual world. But a true nomadic life wouldn't need many possessions, or control and it doesn't need to conquer any territory; it's rather an opposite way of living from a contemporary lifestyle, with the least amount of possessions, no fear of disconnection, and being free from the desire of establishment. It is a lifestyle that is a witness of nature and life, as a kind of process of a pilgrim. Nomadism in contemporary society seems to be motivated from the restless desire of human beings and its follies, rather than pursuing true meaning from nomadic life.

A prominent subtheme resonates throughout the works in "Listening Awry" — the contrast between the modalities of sound and vision. In Kimsooja's Mandala: Zone of Zero (2004), this contrast assumes transcultural, historical, and metaphysical dimensions. Unlike the other works in the exhibition, one first experiences Mandala indirectly, as a faint light softly diffusing around the edges of a pair of partitions. Visitors follow the glimmer through a dim transitional space to then enter a cloistered, alternative realm. The main feature is a radiant, vividly‑hued jukebox, outfitted with mirrored tesserae and flashy ornamentation, and positioned squarely to face the beholder. Carpeting hushes one's footsteps, and the overall calming effect is enhanced by serene, twilight blue walls engulfing the space, lit solely by the jukebox's incandescence. Incongruously, a soundtrack of Tibetan Buddhist, Gregorian and Islamic chants resonates in the room, providing a sacred vocal counterpoint to the visual flamboyance of the jukebox. The disparity between sound and vision could hardly be more extreme or more succinctly composed. Eastern vs. Western cultures, traditional vs. postmodern sensibilities, spiritual vs. materialistic pursuits — these and other polarities suffuse Kimsooja's installation and create a form of listening awry based on paradoxical juxtaposition.

In many ways, the jukebox epitomizes the materialism of American culture. Recalling the postwar optimism and economic surge of the 1950s, the jukebox serves as an icon for youthful, leisurely distraction and ephemeral popular culture. A conspicuous fixture of bars, diners, bowling alleys and other socializing venues for the past century, it still maintains a cultural relevance in the digital era in the figure of the "celestial jukebox" — the utopian repository of personal choice and universal variety. Either as a nostalgic cultural artifact or futuristic ideal for the music industry, the jukebox functions as both the object and enabler of desire. With its flickering reflections, gaudy colours, streaming bubbles, and roulette‑wheel appearance, Kimsooja's jukebox, however, would seem to be one of the last items to be associated with spirituality. Even as the readymade stands alone, disconnected from its complementary cabinet of records or CDs, hovering transcendently, its link to the superficialities of consumer culture and the escapist pleasures of mass entertainment renders it seemingly antithetical to introspection.

Yet, for the artist, the jukebox hears an uncanny resemblance to the geometric schema present in a number of religious traditions, specifically Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu Tantrism. Mandala, the Sanskrit term for "circle," is a sacred diagram that facilitates concentration for spiritual initiates. Symbolically, it can depict the figure of one or several deities, represent the stages of consciousness that adepts pass through on the way to enlightenment, as well as delineate an outline of the cosmos. The formal correspondences between the jukebox and mandalas are striking: both employ hands of concentric circles, a central focal point, and four equidistant markings or "gates" at the cardinal points. For Kimsooja, who moved to New York from Korea in 1998, the similarities were remarkable, if not also painfully ironic. Contrary to the discipline and profundity embodied by the mandala, the jukebox's visual cacophony is designed to amuse. Its entrancing spectacle may inspire stillness to some degree, though probably due more to hypnosis than meditation. Nevertheless, the overall effect of the lights, carpet and enveloping blue walls (blue being one of the conventional signifiers of divinity) conveys a palpable sense of tranquility and sanctuary.

The chanting of monks from three major world religions resound through the space and counteract the jukebox's glitzy presence. At times sonorous, at other times discordant, the chants go in and out of phase as each becomes dominant at various points in the mix. The deep, rumbling bass of Tibetan monks forms a near‑continuous drone upon which the mid‑range polyphonic melodies of a Gregorian choir glide over. At a higher register, the ecstatic vocalizations of a muezzin calling the faithful, along with the ringing of bells, pierce through to intensify the devotional collage. The outpouring of these traditional, centuries‑old chants from a commercial jukebox — instead of the expected pop, rock, hip‑hop, or country & western tunes — not only reconceives the mechanism but also the character of the museum space and those within it. No longer a neutral site for aesthetic contemplation, Mandala charges its surroundings with the mystical energies said to be evoked by the recitation of mantras, prayers and holy texts.

Which side prevails in this "zone of zero," as the subtitle of the piece indicates? Does the simultaneous presence of different belief systems bring forth a greater unity or effect a canceling out? Are the chants reduced to the level of commercial top ten hits, in essence nullifying their esoteric meaning, or is Mandala an object cleverly adapted for surreptitiously inserting spiritual content into a materialistic culture? In the general context of the relationship between the East and West, the artist considers their two opposing sensibilities to be engaged in a dialectic, one that brings together "all basic phenomena of art and life":

Eastern thought often functions as passive and reserved expression: invisible, non‑verbal, indirect, disguised and immaterial. Western thought functions more with issues of identity, controversy, gravity, construction and materiality. The process is finally the awareness and necessity of the presence of both in contemporary art and life. It is the Yin and Yang, a co‑existence that endlessly transforms and enriches.

But more than just a confrontation between consumerism and devotion, Mandala's creation after the invasion of Iraq informs its significance. Like her audio piece Letter from New York (2001), which collages together the chanting of Tibetan monks along with police sirens and jet engines that allude to the World Trade Center attacks, Mandala emerges out of a climate of crisis. The invasion of Iraq has been questioned by many for its dubious rationale and disastrous consequences for the Iraqi population and security around the world. The artist, disturbed by the U.S.'s unprincipled foreign policy and subsequent catastrophes, sought to identify its root causes, which she located in the materialism at the heart of the American ethos. Given this social and political context, Mandala provides both a critique and an antidote. In Kimsooja's meditative space, conflicting sonic and visual experiences combine, antithetical cultural practices interpenetrate, and polarized spiritual and secular sensibilities co‑exist to offer visitors the chance to contemplate the possibility of an improbable, but all‑too necessary, harmony within difference.

A striking aspect of the works discussed above is the degree to which the body is implicated. As Richard Leppert notes, a central paradox of sound lies in its contradictory semiotic status — while the product of (sometimes intense) physical activity, it nevertheless serves as a paradigm of abstraction and ephemerality. Such foregrounding of the physicality of sound's production, as well as its reception, becomes another subtheme in the practices associated with listening awry. Tse, for example, plays the cello and inserts her own body into the dialogic relationship with the natural landscape. Sierra, meanwhile, enlists buglers to stand and perform a twenty‑four‑hour aural fusillade. The simple fact of their bodily presence aggravates the metropolitan security apparatus and confirms the piece's provocational significance. For Marclay, the body is the endpoint for a series of translations that originate in music. However mute, the body conveys a version of musicality twice‑removed via gestural performance. And in the case of Kimsooja's enveloping installation, the bodies of viewers themselves become sound resonators within the sanctuary‑like space. An emphasis on corporeality in these works complements the notion of embeddedness informing "Listening Awry": The embodiment of sound correlates with the embeddedness of sound in social practice, thus completing an overall circuit between listening and being, self and other, the individual and society. Through the din of trumpets, chants, echoes, and noisome gestures can be heard the knocking of the embedded against the embodied as history, affect and politics are brought forward for artistic reflection and critique.