#ResidencyInsights: Flickering as Method: Light, Borders, and Moving Image Practice in ›This Bug is on Fire‹ (Lao Keng-U)

Editor's note: This text was written after the first residency programme at PACT Zollverein in September/ October 2025.

To begin with a cliche, this 5-week residency programme offered us an opportunity to come together to brainstorm, research and experiment with our materials and the story structure of the performance. As the video artist for This Bug is on Fire, I was constantly reflecting on the role of moving images in a live performance setting, drawing from my past experiences in experimental documentary and dance film practices to inform this piece. Initially, I found myself avoiding absolute graphic abstraction as mere background for the performer - what seemed to be an aesthetic wallpaper and an illusion of timelessness would only manipulate the mood and emotion, rather than fostering a more reciprocal dialogue between the audience, performer and screen. Instead, I viewed the screen on stage as a “borderless voyage”, crafting hybrid realities that transformed our researched materials from Macao, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Taiwan into a collaged portrait of Albert’s real-life story of displacement. Most importantly, in a blackbox setting, the screen became an intimate space where we can connect with our protagonist - fireflies, without ever uprooting them from their habitats.

Mythical Travelogue and Mechanical Flickers

How do we cross a border without any identification documents, and where does this crossing lead us? To contextualise the entangled relationship between Albert, fireflies, and the undocumented, we situated our viewers within a Filipino folklore that depicted fireflies as servants carrying messages from spirits. In crafting the segment of the video performance, Albert and I explored his personal diary footages from his visit to the Philippines, where he sought to discover the fireflies. The footage included scenes from night market gatherings, wandering through rural landscapes, visiting offices for migrant workers and observing locals queuing for applications. His secretly filmed footage of crossing the customs border was also utilised to seamlessly transition into a night river guided tour of fireflies in a tropical jungle. Juxtaposed with on-screen texts narrating the folklore, these fragmented images of the mundane came together to form a travelogue that illuminated both the encounter with these mythical beings and the non-linearity of border-crossing (A screenshot from video segment l : Border-crossing
錄像片段一的截圖：跨越邊境 and a screenshot from video segment l : Fireflies on Pause 錄像片段一的截圖：暫停中的螢火蟲).

The encounter with the fireflies and the concept of "light" played a crucial role in the performance. Inspired by Taiwan’s ecological laboratories, where fireflies were nurtured and released into nature as a tourist attraction, we explored the complexities of their existence by fabricating the motion of light. While the centre served an educational purpose, breeding fireflies to perform for spectators raised inherent ethical and personal questions: what does it mean for us to shine? As we reflected on how fireflies were portrayed on screen and how camera technology captured their luminous motion, these themes intersected with issues of migrant labor and the visibility of both fireflies and undocumented communities, often exacerbated by environmental hazards and systemic bugs. To visually approach this, we experimented with the playback of the original footage of fireflies, allowing us to scroll forward and backward, pause&play and fast forward on the timeline in a non-linear manner, while this process was screen-recorded and later re-edited. This not only facilitated a visual examination of fireflies and their luminosity, but also created a manipulated motion of light that mirrored the nature of their labour.

Notes on the Utopian Prison and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”

Albert's undocumented background and the survival stories of fireflies also explore the personal and socio-political tensions in "grey zones", such as the sibling cities of Hong Kong and Macao, both of which are special administrative regions of China. Growing up in Macao, I lived in a neighbourhood populated by migrant workers. Regrettably, I never took the initiative to engage with these communities, missing out on a different perspective of my hometown. In one of Albert's field recordings in the central area of the city, we listened to a conversation between two Filipino workers who jokingly discussed a plan to get arrested. Their jailed friend claimed that life inside prison was better than living outside, with the promise of free food and accommodation—despite the ever-present fear of deportation. The dialogue was transcribed on screen and juxtaposed against a long take of a camera tracing the fireflies. Due to the camera's weak low-light sensor, vibrant colour noises inevitably appeared on the surface of the images.

Instead of de-noising, we leveraged these digital artefacts to the fullest to anchor the mystery surrounding the fireflies' appearance and disappearance, accentuating their ethereal qualities, as well as meditating on the mechanics of the film medium itself. While this segment may have seemed satirical, it underscored the complexities and raw realities faced by migrant workers in Macao, revealing both their struggles and resilience through ethnographic listening. As the city of Macao gleams with the second highest GDP on this green earth, the fireflies are forced to hide from the dazzling lights of the casinos (A screenshot from video segment ll : Utopian Prison).

The final segment of the performance was a “light it up!” ceremony dedicated to the 14-day buffering zone for unemployed migrant workers in Hong Kong before deportation, as well as the brief, ephemeral existence of fireflies. Accompanying this was an erotic and electrifying performance by Albert, set to the backdrop of the pop song “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” The screen itself took on a consciousness, creating a lo-fi atmospheric cult that invited the audience to clap—after all, clapping could make fireflies flicker, according to a tour guide (A behind-the-scenes still from video segment lll and a screenshot from video segment lll : “Operation Dragon”).

The segment visually presented a blend of personal and public archives, fictionalised through elements like old family photos, certificates of successful migrant candidates, Albert’s birth certificates, archival footage of Macao’s undocumented community in social chaos. Found objects, such as prayer cards from church, were scanned and manipulated digitally, and AI-generated fireflies dancing in space were all incorporated into this surreal montage of remembering (A screenshot from video segment lll : A Photo from mum’s album).

The undocumented are never truly undocumented. As creative practitioners, we collage and re-collage our materials to piece together our autonomous document to look beyond power authority—a bug in the system created during the colonial era and later neglected by new governance. The camera's sensor, the flicker frequency of the fireflies, and the human optical system were never in sync; we sense and emit light differently. Through the survival of fireflies and Albert's resilience for the undocumented, it is intriguing to think differently about how bioluminescence serves as our non-institutionalised travel instrument—a 'B-ticket' to a borderless voyage, where the motion of light can be lost, hidden, beamed,  duplicated, and translocated alongside and within us, illuminating the path to new possibilities.