Actual Reality

Lucky Dragons is a Los Angeles-based experimental music group, and includes any recorded, performed, installed, packaged, shared, suggested or imagined pieces made by Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara.

The group’s name is borrowed from a Japanese fishing boat that was caught in the fallout of the hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the 1950s. The crew and the boat were contaminated, and the Lucky Dragon became a crystalizing symbol for the previously diffuse worldwide anti-nuclear sentiment. Eventually the boat was painted black, renamed the Dark Falcon, and used as a fishing vessel until it was retired and disposed of on a manmade trash island called Dream Island, where it remains today.

Lucky Dragons is about the birthing of new and temporary creatures—equal power situations in which audience members cooperate among themselves, building up fragile networks held together by such light things as skin contact, unfamiliar language, temporary logic, and the spirit of celebration. At the heart of it all is playing together, building up social collectivities, and re-engaging the wonder and impossibility of technological presence.

Fischbeck and Rara have presented interactive performances and installations at MOCA Los Angeles, the Smell, Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Kitchen and PS1 in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, REDCAT and LACMA in Los Angeles, Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, ICA London, ICA Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.