For Lucky Dragons, the Los Angeles-based multimedia band comprised of artists Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, sound is the path to utopia. The two speak fervently of a "community that is endless and potentially can include everyone," a lofty goal that every Lucky Dragons show comes closer to realizing. Ross Simonini spoke with the pair about how their performances erase the boundary between artists and audience, involving all present in sound-and-light displays, as well as the occasional Japanese ink mural.

I’ve noticed that, on your Web site, you call your shows "actions." Why is that?

Luke Fischbeck: The list on our Web site includes not only performances, but also screenings, gallery shows, book releases, and occasionally less easily categorized events that we are perhaps only associated with, not involved with directly. The term "action" is for us an alternative to the more passive "event" that is used more frequently — an alternative that suggests agency as well as continuity, and leaves room for transaction. Actions have meanings, involve choices, and encourage reactions, and once started can be picked up at a later point by someone else. I’m personally OK with wherever one wants to put the focus in our performances — on the artist, on the group, on the group as an artist — but would like them to be less like isolated events, more like actions that take into account the field of reactions, dialogue not monologue.

Is the term "action" a reference to Joseph Beuys?

LF: Beuys’s thoughts on social sculpture and direct democracy in particular are an inspiration to us, but when I think about what we are referring to, I put the term in the larger context of "social action" (from Max Webers writings in the 1920s to cybernetics) and "direct action" (civil rights, Gandhi, Catholic workers). Bruno Latours "actor-network theory," situating action in a hybrid network of people and things — nature, technology, media, governments, etc. — where humans and non-humans both have agency, has also been on my mind a lot recently.

Are your actions pretty free-form? To what degree are your shows structured? Would you say that improvisation — both in terms of the music and the actions — occurs on stage?

Sarah Rara: There is a set list, but it is a loose description of different actions, which are often largely determined by the group of instruments we have built for the show or the tuning system we’ve arrived at in consideration of the space and the size of the audience. A recent set list might read, "Sundial Filtering, Hugh Tracy, Wrong Spectrum, Feeling Modern, Make a Baby, All That’s Solid Melts Into Air." Each of these phrases refers to a network of actions or behaviors, a kind of game that gets played out in a spontaneous way by us and everyone present. We often have no idea how a given space will physically resonate or how people will react, and in "Sundial Song," I generally sing until I’ve found the resonant frequency of that space — the point at which the voice can double in amplitude just bouncing off the walls — or find the sound of the white noise rattling in the PA and use it as a mask. I imagine the group lifting in the air or sinking into the ground, when that frequency shakes the room. I’ve been more involved lately in how the architecture of different spaces shapes the collective sound, and the way people organize themselves during the show. More and more I am seeking out the architectural plans and am diagramming where I think the sound will travel and how this will affect the social interaction that occurs. There’s a great deal of research, but it all accumulates to create a situation in which the result is purposefully open-ended, where different possibilities are tested. We hardly ever practice, in fact there is no way to rehearse the performance, rather the show itself is where ideas get tested out. Beforehand, there is mostly thinking, speculating, tuning, programming, and writing. During the show, I strive to learn, learn, and learn rather than simply to present. I’ve been in a few bands, and I have always been the designated wild card, the one that can’t help deviating from the plan. I can’t be trusted to repeat the melody.

You attended Harvard and Brown. Who did you study with? Did you focus on electronic music or concert music? How did that lead to Lucky Dragons?

LF: I was in the "visual and environmental studies" department at Harvard, not the music department — so it was as a visual artist that I first studied music, in Ivan Tcherepnins electronic music studio — but the distinction wasn’t important to anyone, I don’t think. Ivan’s children (our generation), are both composers — Stefan and Sergei Tcherepnin. Their work falls naturally in between visual art and performance, academic and popular music. The first Lucky Dragons music was made using the Serge Modular synthesizer, which Ivan built with his brother. I did wind up in grad school for music composition at Brown — less concert music than computer programming, digital signal processing, interface design — a kind of technical school, which I appreciate now.

SR: I went to Brown for Comparative Literature, I can see now how the refusal to specialize and the overlapping of different fields instilled a pleasure in things that are endless, sprawling, multiple, organized as networks.

Can you describe the Sumi Ink Club?

LF: Sumi Ink Club uses group drawing as a recipe for social interaction and collaborative production. It’s very casual; we hold regular, open-to-the-public meetings either in our studio or in specific places. Brushes and ink are provided and anyone who stops by is invited to add to the work in progress. All ages, all styles are welcome. Sumi ink, when not diluted with water, is very flat and opaque. Once something’s been drawn, it can either be obliterated or connected to — there’s no layering. There is always a tipping point in the drawing when people focus less on staking out their own space and more on the connecting areas, continuing each other’s lines, making a drawing that is truly collaborative, with some impossible hybrid author. We like the idea of a "club" as opposed to "collective" as it suggests the possibility of belonging. Since anyone can join, the barriers to collaboration, and mutual accountability for the drawing, are pretty low. Also, the materials being cheap and the method being so simple, we’ve had some success in encouraging other groups to hold Sumi Ink Club meetings without our presence as primary members being necessary, which is one of the ends we’re pursuing: ideal collaboration can be given away.

SR: A group of eight-year-olds (now they are 10?) started their own group in Brooklyn and publish their own 'zines. They wrote to us to say they’d switched to markers instead of ink, because the ink was too messy for them. We wrote back to say, 'that is a great idea!' They’ve developed their own style and way of working as a group, and that is what Sumi Ink Club is about. The only thing I hope to maintain is that the meetings should always be free to attend, all ages, and open to anyone who wants to participate. Those are the basic ground rules of Sumi Ink Club.

Is Sumi Ink Club directly related to Lucky Dragons?

SR: They are connected in the sense that they share a similar ethos of collaboration and power sharing. But we treat them as separate entities, mainly so that people feel free to hold their own Sumi Ink Club events and local meetings. There have been moments where we’ve experimented with combining the two, like in Auto-Italia in London, which is an artist-run gallery located in a building that was originally a car dealership. We held an open meeting of SIC where people gathered to paint the wrap-around windows and then Lucky Dragons performed when the sun went down. When we commissioned Sumi Ink Club to make the cover for our last album, "Open Power," we formally asked SIC if they would do it, even though the two groups often contain the same members. They said yes.

LF: They dovetail in nice ways. Whereas Lucky Dragons projects are often participatory, Sumi Ink Club extends these actions more explicitly to the level of collaboration and group ownership. We’ll keep inventing new projects that draw from what we’ve learned — alternative ways of working towards similar goals that are won’t cancel one another out, that inform each other and borrow from each other. With so many answers, we’re getting closer to figuring out what the question is.

Can you describe the New Other Thing?

SR: It’s a record label that involves no money and no objects. Everything is free. No records or CDs are produced, the albums stream from the Web site. People often like to contribute experiments, single takes, or things they’ve been working on that don’t make it into the finished album. All the weird, wonderful stuff that you hardly ever hear. In a way it’s like raiding someone’s personal archive and extracting a gem that might otherwise not become public.

LF: We started it as a collaboration with our friend Brendan Fowler, as a way to make the process of releasing and distributing music more like the process by which we’ve become used to listening to music (casually, on demand, everywhere, always, easily and infinitely shared, outside of any economy or law) but keeping the aesthetic and ethic of punk culture that initially brought us into a material relationship with music — curated, handmade, small-scale, and with a will towards sustainability and cohesion that gets beyond pure publicity. Whether this makes sense for a net-label remains to be seen, but at the moment it’s a fun way to bring people into the process of rethinking what it means to release music.

What types of projects have been going on at the Elysian Park Museum of Art (EPMoA)?

SR: The wonderful thing about EPMoA is that it has really taken off on its own. There is no centralized curating team or board of trustees, it is a museum open to everyone in whatever role they choose to adopt or create. The most recent projects have included a sound piece by Amy Howden-Chapman, and a series of temporary installations curated by Akina Cox. Since Elysian Park is by itself a beautiful environment to appreciate, my personal hope is that artists will feel compelled to make ephemeral works with zero footprint. I don’t advocate leaving "stuff" permanently in the park, as I think a huge problem with public art is that interest and funding seems to mostly go towards massive sculptures. I would like to consider public art as something that could be more dispersed, invisible, transient, floating by, and changing a space in as subtle a way as radio successfully does.

LF: The Elysian Park Museum of Art starts from the premise that a museum is a process as much as it is a place, and encourages visitors to Elysian Park — an incredibly diverse, mixed-use urban park near downtown Los Angeles — to reconsider the park as a museum. Interventions such as Andrew Coxs "Piñata Pulley" or Lazers "Lizard Lounge" foreground the public’s potential interactions with the park as a cultural space.

Would you say that Lucky Dragons has a larger, conceptual framework? Or is it more of a loose, umbrella term?

LF: We’re always in the process of learning — keeping projects conceptually separate, allowing them to develop independently, yet always informing each other’s development. That’s the framework. There are definitely shared goals, one of which is preserving the potential for different goals to co-exist.

How do you feel about the term "relational" as it has recently been applied to forms of interactive art?

LF: Everyone knows relationships are complicated! We are working in the generation that has come after relational art of the 90s, in the sense we hold onto a utopian idea that we can be both inside and outside of a system of relationships. We rely obsessively on collaboration — with members of a public, with technology, with media, with money, with each other, with counter-publics — the question "for whom and why" has exploded, continues to explode, in fact. A smoldering volcano, a lava-filled sink-hole caving in on itself. I still struggle to avoid the conclusion that all relationships can be reduced to economic ones, and naively try to assert my own punk prejudices into every context I enter, in the hopes of avoiding such a collapse.

SR: Relational art from the 90s is one of the cornerstones of what we’re doing. Art is definitely a game, an encounter, "a social interstice" to borrow Bourriauds phrase. But we come from an Internet era, where the act of reading is no longer something private. The idea of what a public or an audience can be is open and fully up for grabs at this point. There is something beautiful about the live performances and simply being in a room with someone, in that case we can map that connection pretty directly and see where it goes. But now we have to acknowledge that there are interactions that cannot be so easily mapped, that the whole thing is sprawling, distributed, and partially invisible. That is exciting to me, the idea of a community that is endless and potentially can include everyone.

In terms of its balance between art and music, how has Lucky Dragons changed since it began?

SR: I think somehow that for Luke and myself the pendulum between art and music is sometimes swinging in opposite directions. For instance, I have no formal music training. I began making music because I needed very specific soundtracks for the video work I was making in 2003. And now sound is an obsession; I feel that music has no boundary if loosely defined as the breaking up of time, a thing vibrating or resonating, or two waves either canceling each other or reinforcing each other. These metaphors of how music works apply to any social situation, any visual composition. I’m writing from New Orleans, and completely wowed by the jazz and by the confluence of communities in the second-line parades led by local brass bands. So while Lucky Dragons itself in a general way is equally art and music, I find that my attention is generally swinging between visual and aural poles. In the studio I will designate a week to recording, or a week to video-editing and drawing, and generally keep them pretty separate until the final stage. There is a continuity of the ideas worked into each medium, and perhaps that is where the linkage occurs, things meshing together in surprising ways approached from different angles.

LF: Ha! One of the best parts of being part of a collaboration is that swinging pendulum, going in and out of phase (in itself a musical
 analogy?) I feel that we are lucky — we have managed to develop visual and musical ideas independently, at the same rate, without either one dominating the other. But then, maybe this isn’t so unusual? Punk was never so much about music as it was about politics and aesthetics. We’ve been trying out new things that fill in the cracks. Let’s see what the future holds.

In what ways, if any, do you want Lucky Dragons to be connected to culture at large?

SR: The question is a bit difficult to answer, because in many ways I assume we are already inextricably linked to the culture at large. It’s not a matter of making a connection or insertion, because we are already in the stream of culture. It would be impossible to make music autonomously or separate from the rest of human activity. Whether or not it meets the mark, I’ve always attempted to make art that is for everyone. Ring tones have become a bit of a fascination for me, as well as parades, radio, furniture, fashion, and mass transit. I’d like to be more involved in city planning, to work on that scale. For Sumi Ink Club my goal is to have everyone in Los Angeles County present for a meeting — that would be a wonder to behold.