A New Aesthetic of Participation (2024)

Gabrielle Martin chats with Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, co-directors of asses.masses.

Show Notes

Gabrielle, Patrick and Milton discuss: 

• How did your relationship with PuSh start?

• What are the importance of youth programs across various festivals?

• What is asses.masses and what was the process of creating it and bringing it to PuSh?

• What is the place for participatory work?

• What are the other patterns and ways of showing work?

• Who is the live body on stage and how does it interface with the digital world?

• What is a performing arts festival now, especially after Covid?

• What is the future of asses.masses?

About Patrick Blenkarn

Patrick Blenkarn is an artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. His research-based practice revolves around the themes of language, labour, and economy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books.

His work and collaborations have been featured in performance festivals, galleries, museums, and film festivals, including Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, the Humboldt Forum (Berlin), Festival of Live Digital Art (Kingston), STAGES Festival (Halifax), Banff Centre for the Arts, Risk/Reward (Portland), SummerWorks (Toronto), rEvolver (Vancouver), RISER Projects (Toronto), and the Festival of Recorded Movement (Vancouver). In 2020, he was nominated for Best Projection Design at Toronto’s Dora Awards. In 2022, his work with Milton Lim, asses.masses, received a National Creation Fund investment from the National Arts Centre of Canada.

Patrick has frequently been an artist in residence at galleries and theatres around the world, including USC Games (Los Angeles), The Arctic Circle (Svalbard), the Spitsbergen Artist Center (Svalbard), GlogauAIR (Berlin), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver), Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland), VIVO Media Arts (Vancouver), and The Theatre Centre (Toronto).

Patrick is also the co-founder of and a key archivist for videocan, Canada’s video archive of performance documentation. He has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King's College and an MFA from Simon Fraser University. His writings on the politics of theatre have been published in Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, GUTS, SpiderWebShow, and Canadian Theatre Review.

He is based out of Vancouver and Los Angeles.

About Milton Lim

Milton Lim (he/him) is a digital media artist, game designer, and performance creator based in Vancouver, Canada: the traditional, unceded, and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

His research-based practice entwines publicly available data, interactive digital media, and gameful performance to create speculative visions and candid articulations of social capital. This line of inquiry aims to reconsider our repertoires of knowledge aggregation and political intervention in the contemporary context of big data and algorithmic culture. Often cheeky and audience/participant driven, his work challenges standard performance traditions including duration, linearity, and repeatability. Milton holds a BFA (Hons.) in theatre performance and psychology from Simon Fraser University.

He has created works for and performed in various international festivals and venues including PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), CanAsian Dance Festival (Toronto), Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), Carrefour international de théâtre festival (Quebec City), IMPACT Festival (Kitchener), Seattle International Dance Festival, Risk/Reward Festival (Portland), Festival Internacional de Teatro Universitario / FITU at Teatro UNAM (Mexico City), Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, Mayfest (Bristol), artsdepot (London), Battersea Arts Centre (London), New Theatre Royal (Portsmouth), Strike a Light Festival (Gloucester), Teatre Lliure (Barcelona), Inteatro (Ancona), Hong Kong Arts Festival, soft/WALL/studs (Singapore), and Darwin Festival.

Performance credits include The Arts Club’s The Great Leap, Gateway Theatre’s King of the Yees at Canada's National Arts Centre, and Theatre Conspiracy’s award-winning immersive show: Foreign Radical at CanadaHub (Edinburgh Fringe). Milton's media artworks have been presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery, San Francisco State University, F-O-R-M, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and The New Gallery. In 2016, he was awarded the Ray Michal Prize for Outstanding Body of Work at the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards.

He is a co-artistic director of Hong Kong Exile, an artistic associate with Theatre Conspiracy, a co-founder and key archivist with the videocan national video archive of performing arts documentation, a recent artistic-leader-in-residence with the National Theatre School (Canada), one of the co-creators behind culturecapital: the performing arts economy trading card game, and one of the co-creators of asses.masses: the video game. In 2022, his work on asses.masses received the prestigious National Creation Fund from the National Arts Centre of Canada and it is now touring internationally in 5+ languages.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded in what is now known as Montreal, on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka, a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst many First Nations including the Kanien’kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron/Wendat, Abenaki, and Anishinaabeg.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

Gabrielle Martin 00:02 Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming. 

Gabrielle Martin 00:23 Today's episode features Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim and the 2024 Push Festival. Patrick and Milton are conceptual artists whose collaborations include video games, participatory installations, and card games, exploring urgent questions around social value of art, digital labor, and the political and artistic potential of games. 

Gabrielle Martin 00:43 Here's my conversation with Patrick and Milton. My name is Gabrielle, I'm the Director of Programming with Push, and today I have the pleasure of being in conversation with Patrick Blencarn and Milton Lim. 

Gabrielle Martin 00:56 Thank you for joining me. 

Patrick Blenkarn 00:58 Hello, very happy to be here. Bye. Bye. 

Gabrielle Martin 01:00 And we are here in Jojage, or Montreal, which has long been the meeting place of many First Nations, including the Kanyan -Kahaka, the Abenaki, the Anishinaabe, and the Wendat. And we're also in front of the Festival Transamerique headquarters for Festival... 

Gabrielle Martin 01:16 Croix des Generals, Festival Hub, because Patrick and Milton were just presenting us as masses, which was presented in Push 2024, so we're going to be talking about that. But first, I just want to have some context of understanding how your relationship began with Push and how it's evolved. 

Gabrielle Martin 01:34 So, Milton, I know that you have a history with Push, with your work with Hong Kong Exile, you were artist in residency, your work was presented at the Push, numerous times for that company. Can you just give us a bit of that context? 

Milton Lim 01:48 Yeah, I guess to start off, I'd kind of known about Push when I was a student at Simon Fraser University. It was like the thing that we all saved up our money for every year just to like splurge and see all the shows that we could because it was bringing in the most exciting international work. 

Milton Lim 02:05 We could see it very visibly kind of changed the kind of formal and aesthetic conversations that we were having as artists. And I think by far like it's done one of the most important kind of jobs of helping Vancouver artists not only be seen on the international stage, but also draw from the international stage back into our own local aesthetics. 

Milton Lim 02:25 And so as a student, I remember just like being in awe every year of the shows that we wouldn't always agree upon coming out. And that always felt really strong in terms of like having work that was taking a risk, trying to be innovative in some form or another. 

Milton Lim 02:39 And then I had started a company called Hong Kong Exile with Natalie Tinyan Ghan and Remy Su. And we were very fortunate under the tenureship of George Cesario and Norman Armour to have been asked as local artists to be the artists in residence for two years. 

Milton Lim 02:54 What years were those? That was kind of 2016 -2018. We got to present in Club Push the first year, and then we got to present Foxconn Frequency as part of the main series in 2018. Was there precedence for the residency before you? 

Milton Lim 03:10 I think there was, but it wasn't formalized and it also wasn't a local artist. Yeah. 

Patrick Blenkarn 03:14 I feel