For (LISTEN), Christine Sun Kim will lead attendees on a sound walk through the Lower East Side. Drawing on her early experiences living and working in the neighborhood, Kim will give focus to spaces, sensations, and sound sources of special mnemonic significance. Attendees are encouraged to consider their own listening in relation to Kim’s memories, reevaluating how to experience sound in space and space as sound.

(LISTEN) (2016) takes as its starting point the 1966 realization of LISTEN by sound artist Max Neuhaus (1939-2009), initiated in the same neighborhood before its international presentation through the mid-1970s. LISTEN was understood as a non-verbal ‘lecture’ on soundscape as well as a form of collective music-making. Instead of a musical composition, notated and performed by specialists, the sound walk is ‘composed’ by the listening participants who find form and meaning in an indeterminate acoustic environment. In Kim’s adaptation, the title “(LISTEN)” is substituted, emphasizing layers of subjective, interpersonal, and technical mediation involved in non-verbal communication. (LISTEN) is not a recreation of Neuhaus’ piece, but an adaptation for the 21st century as the technologies and boundaries of listening have expanded.