This essay describes an in-person audiencing of North Korea’s 2012 Arirang Mass Games, a massive spectacle featuring the synchronized movement of more than 80,000 performers, which celebrates the birth of the North Korean nation and its continued resistance to foreign incursion. The authors argue that audiencing across cultures must take into account not only the “meaning effects” of propaganda and other cultural productions, but also the “presence effects” through which culture is materialized. These presence effects give material specificity to otherwise abstract claims to common humanity across cultures, which is particularly important when trying to understand those who one’s own culture views as radically Other.