Has technology become a shamanistic belief system in and of itself? Certainly, A.I. devotion could lead one to believe so, as could IM Youngzoo‘s immersive new exhibition at Space ZeroOne in New York. Open through July 25, “The Late 故” places a VR-like installation about tricking the messenger of death alongside extensive research from the artist’s recent New York residency—there are exchanges with scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, explorations of taxidermy practices, and birdwatcher tracking systems. All the while, LiDAR sensors track the movement of visitors through the show, logging this ongoing data in the artist’s files.
Excerpts from Calming Signal (2023/25), for which Youngzoo received the 2025 Frieze Artist Award, are included in The Late 故 (2025/26) and round out the show, guiding visitors from space to space and through a spiritual and technological afterlife. In each room, the artist brings these seemingly diametrically opposed realms closer to one another. “I grew up in Korea during a period of extremely rapid technological acceleration, yet shamanistic practices and spiritual beliefs still existed close to everyday life. For me, those worlds never felt entirely separate,” she explains, when we discuss her latest solo showing. “I think that coexistence—living inside both at once, without having to choose—strongly shaped the way I understand technology, belief, and perception today.”
As visitors began to move through Space ZeroOne, mechanical eyes trained on every shift, Youngzoo shared her thoughts on the overlap between our deepest held spiritual and scientific beliefs, bringing technology into the white cube, and the biggest difference between Korean and American viewers’ responses to her work.
What first drew you to the intersection of superstition and science? What has been the most interesting revelation from your research so far?
Through [my upbringing], I came to feel that superstition and science are not opposing systems but structures that have always borrowed from one another. Historically, shamanism and divination attempted to interface with invisible worlds through symbols, ritual, repetition, and intuition. Modern science tried to stabilize reality through measurement and verification. But look at contemporary technology, and something has shifted: the “black box” is increasingly accepted as a methodology in itself.
A.I. is a clear example. Earlier programming cultures emphasized understanding and controlling the internal logic of code. Now, with things like “vibe coding,” people routinely trust systems whose internal processes they cannot fully explain. At that point, technology begins moving closer to the structure of belief. What fascinates me is how visible that overlap has become. Tech leaders sometimes resemble spiritual gurus, presenting visions of the future as prophecy or salvation. People participate not only in the technology itself but in the temporal imagination it promises.
Belief doesn’t disappear—it reappears through new interfaces. In that sense, I often think of VR, A.I., and networked systems not simply as tools but as contemporary forms of hut-geot: environments that reorganize time, space, and perception through immersive structures of faith.
What interests you about incorporating technologies like VR into your work? How do you think it changes the landscape of a gallery?
I’m less interested in VR as futuristic spectacle and more interested in it as a perceptual condition. VR destabilizes orientation, embodiment, scale, and certainty—it forces viewers to constantly renegotiate what feels synchronized, trustworthy, or physically real. In some ways, the gallery itself already functions as a kind of proto-VR structure. It reorganizes perception, temporarily separates the body from ordinary time and space, and invites viewers into a suspended reality.
So immersive technologies are not entirely new. They continue much older spatial technologies—ritual, meditation, shamanistic practice, theater, cinema, gallery—all of which reorganize perception and create interfaces with elsewhere. I’m especially drawn to how these systems oscillate between science and faith, simulation and ritual. At the same time, I’m often more interested in moments when they fail: stitching errors, latency, sensory discomfort, slight misalignments. Those ruptures reveal how technological systems attempt to suture perception and stabilize belief—and where they can’t.
Interestingly, despite working with immersive technology, I often feel that books remain among the most futuristic interfaces. Unlike predictive systems that collapse time into real-time immediacy, books preserve temporal distance and allow asynchronous perception. They connect different bodies and temporalities slowly, across delays and gaps.
Shamanistic practices and technological systems are framed as distinct strategies for processing the world. Which do you personally lean toward? Does that shift in your artistic practice?
I don’t really experience them as separate categories. Both are ultimately interfaces humans construct to orient themselves within uncertainty and establish relationships with invisible systems. Personally, I move back and forth depending on the situation. Technology promises precision and objectivity; ritual acknowledges ambiguity and emotional complexity more openly. But contemporary technological culture is also full of repetition, ritualized behavior, and invisible assumptions—structures that often resemble spiritual systems more than we admit.
In my practice, I’m drawn to the unstable zones where those structures begin to resemble each other. I’m not arguing they’re equivalent, but I want viewers to notice how both ultimately rely on interpretation, synchronization, and belief.
What do you hope visitors carry with them when they leave?
The opening scene of the exhibition contains multiple declarations of failure. The first page of the book—too heavy to hold in one hand—is titled A Book of Failures. I wanted the exhibition to begin from that condition. Rather than presenting technology or spirituality as systems that successfully overcome uncertainty, I’m interested in the sensation of repeated failure itself: failing to fully leave the body, failing to accurately predict the future, failing to synchronize with systems, failing to arrive at transcendence.
And yet humans continue constructing technologies, rituals, and narratives precisely because of those failures. I think of the exhibition less as an attempt to determine what is scientific or superstitious, real or unreal, and more as a study of systems that keep operating despite repeated failure. I hope visitors leave more aware of how much contemporary life is already structured through invisible systems—signals, infrastructures, predictive models, interfaces. And I hope they recognize that our relationship to those systems is sustained less by certainty than by ongoing acts of synchronization and belief.
Looking at the works as a whole, can you trace where your own understanding deepened or shifted?
One important aspect of this exhibition is placing my earliest works alongside the most recent. Across them, certain themes persist: training to overcome bodily coordinates and connect with outside worlds, waiting for apocalypse, death, or failure to arrive. Earlier works were closer to observation—collecting relationships between different perceptual systems. Over time, I became increasingly interested in instability itself: glitches, mistranslations, failed synchronization, fragmented memory, displaced orientation.
I also began thinking less about technology as a tool and more as an environment that organizes perception, temporality, and social experience. More recently I’ve become attentive to bodily states—fatigue, dizziness, repetition, breathing—and how they’re recalibrated within technological interfaces. Looking back, I think many of the works were already orbiting the same question: why humans continue rehearsing methods for exceeding bodily, spatial, or temporal limits, despite repeated failure.
Do you think the work will be interpreted differently by an American audience?
Possibly. In Korea, references to shamanism or geomantic thinking still exist close to cultural memory, even indirectly. In the United States, those elements may read as more symbolic or unfamiliar. At the same time, American audiences may connect more strongly to the technological dimensions—simulation, virtuality, surveillance, interfaces, belief in technological infrastructure. I’m interested in how meaning shifts across different technological histories and cultural relationships to modernity.
What adjustments did you make to the work to adapt it to this new context?
Most of the adjustments were not about making the work translate more smoothly—they were about revealing the gaps that translation itself produces. I don’t believe translation can ever be entirely seamless. Whenever language, cultural context, or technological environment shifts, misalignments inevitably emerge.
I’m more interested in exposing those fissures than concealing them. In some ways, the gap became one of the central perceptual conditions of the exhibition. This connects closely to the stitching errors visible in the videos. Usually, 360-degree imaging technologies attempt to seamlessly suture heterogeneous images together. I’m more drawn to moments when that stitching fails—slightly displaced boundaries, torn spatiotemporal continuity, incomplete synchronization. So the adjustments here were less about smooth adaptation and more about exposing the traces and tensions left when different systems fail to fully merge.
How do you hope to continue investigating these overlaps? Is there a research direction you’re moving toward?
Recently I’ve become especially interested in rehabilitation as a condition. It feels like an intermediate state, neither fully alive nor fully dead. The body moves toward recovery while simultaneously recalling past sensations, memories, damaged temporalities. What interests me is that rehabilitation appears to move toward the future while constantly orienting itself toward the past. Humans walk forward, but systems attempt to restore previous forms of movement and perception. That structure connects deeply to questions of technology, memory, repetition, and prediction.
I’ve also become increasingly interested in slower, more delayed interfaces. Books, again—I keep returning to them as perhaps the most futuristic technology. Unlike systems that compress time into real-time immediacy, books preserve temporal distance and allow asynchronous perception. They connect different bodies and temporalities slowly, across delays and gaps. I want to continue exploring these intermediate conditions. I’m especially drawn to systems that never fully succeed or completely fail, systems that remain suspended in ongoing states of recalibration.
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