Lucky Dragons, Our Sun and the True Sun

Our Sun and the True Sun

Lucky Dragons in ‘The Bear Pit’

Focal Point gallery, Southend-on-Sea

10 - 28 August

Lucky Dragons performance: 22 August, 6 - 8pm

Focal Point Gallery has invited artist-run spaces; Grand Union, OUTPOST and M-E-X-I-C-O to curate a programme for a period of three weeks each this Summer. For this purpose a Bear Pit installation has been built in the gallery, which simultaneously operates as both studio and exhibiting space. Visitors can observe the activity from a raised gantry which surrounds and creates a viewing point for an enclosed area below.

For the 10-28 August, OUTPOST has invited Lucky Dragons to respond to The Bear Pit for this 3-week period at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea.

Lucky Dragons’ three-week residency at Focal Point Gallery will make use of The Bear Pit as an experimental site for the study of long distance communication, co-location, and time-shifting. Streaming images, sound, and language in an array of feedback loops across a variety of scales, Fischbeck and Rara will open a direct channel of communication between Southend-on-Sea and Los Angeles, as well as testing out new forms of exchange between audience and performers within the gallery itself. Layers of live and delayed transmissions accumulated during the first half of the residency—video chats, webcam feeds, radio broadcasts, audio loops, etc—will be presented as unstable documents of uncertain origin, culminating in a focused performance that explores our sense of simultaneity, being-together, and common frames of reference across physical and temporal distance.

Following the performance, collected material will be translated, stored, and made apparent as residual effects: delayed sounds return, analysed and re-synthesised; video images, converted to electricity through photovoltaic cells, begin again as generative patterns of light. Forms of display, performance, and interactivity will be found through on-site experimentation, taking shape, breaking down, and recombining over the course of the residency.