Conversations in ten questions 91 : Patrick Blenkarn & Milton Lim (asses.masses)
© Frank Sperling
asses.masses, their major piece, is a custom video game designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience, one person at a time. It is the eight hour epic story of a herd of unemployed donkeys trying to get their jobs back, all while navigating the perils of a post-Industrial society in which they’ve been made redundant. It has premiered in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Flemish, and Catalan at major festivals in the US, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, the UK, and various European cities before its Turkish version at Paribu Art, Istanbul's newest performing arts venue, on Saturday, September 20th, 2025, and Sunday, September 21st, 2025, as part of the Istanbul Fringe Festival. Among its upcoming premieres in the coming months are the Korean version in South Korea and the Portuguese version in Porto.
Now, we turn the floor over to Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, who creatively and entertainingly answered our questions with their interplay-like answers, much like a video game.
What is the essence of performance in your opinion?
Milton: The essence is probably somewhere between the idea of why people gather and the intimacy of the gathering itself.
Patrick: Agreed. But there are so many different forms of performance and different people making it. In its early days, asses.masses proved time and again that many people didn’t think that performance should include video games.
Milton: Obviously, we disagree with those people.
Patrick: Agreed.
Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?
Patrick: Yes. On the artists through how it’s made and on the audience through how it’s experienced.
Milton: And in the larger cultural imagination of what is possible, artistically and politically.
Patrick: I feel changed by art.
Milton: Same, same.
Patrick: But not all the time of course.
Milton: No, not all the time, very true… how about right now?
Patrick: Kinda?
When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?
Milton: Unfortunately, I don’t remember my dreams.
Patrick: I don’t remember my dreams either. So we have to work harder than dreamers—read more books, watch more movies, play more games.
Milton: We tend to absorb as much source material as possible when making a project though. In asses.masses, you’ll see countless references across cinema, literature, performance, and of course, video games—everything from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to Final Fantasy, to fables, and ancient texts from around the world. We worked on the project for 5 years, so… it’s a long list of inspirations.
When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on if it already does not have one?
Milton: Very early. We’re big on titles.
Patrick: Yes. We landed asses.masses (which is derived from an essay “Asses and Masses” by Theodor Lessing) and never looked back.
Milton: I feel like there’s a backside or behind or butt-related joke. But, I’ll leave this up to the readers’ imaginations. #participatory
Are there any artist or person whom you think influenced your art most? And if there is such an artist or person, who?
Patrick: In a work as large and multifaceted as asses.masses, we had the opportunity to draw on a lot of our influences.
Milton: Yes, but I find it really hard to say the “most”. Like, how I have trouble choosing a “best friend”.
Patrick: …
Milton: Patrick, we’ve talked about this. You’re up there.
When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?
Milton: We certainly share interests in trying to understand how live performance is able to tackle any issue, if at all. We continuously ask ourselves how and why people gather to experience art, where people go to be culturally engaged, and under what contexts they feel like they can actually participate and build something greater than just the artwork itself.
Patrick: Our collaborations and respective works come back often to political themes—How do we organize ourselves? How do we determine the value of something? Are we using the opportunity of being together to its fullest potential? We hope asses.masses can make good use of our time, towards something that feels urgent, interpersonal, and affirming to all of us.
How did the idea for asses.masses, an eight-hour immersive video game performed in a theatre, come about and how did it develop?
Patrick: I’d been studying the history of donkeys for a few years before Milton and I started the project, including making a prototype of a lecture performance about the donkey skin trade that involved a video game. I got a residency to develop the project, focusing more on the idea of donkeys and video games, but all the funding fell through, so Milton and I used the residency time to learn how to make video games.
Milton: The first version was 25 minutes long and performed in Portland, Oregon. We didn’t know how long it was going to be, but as we started writing and developing the story, and our game design skills, we kept adding episodes. Its final approximately 8-hour duration (the length of an average workday) seemed fitting given our subject matter.
Why are donkeys the protagonists of asses.masses?
Milton: We get asked this question a lot.
Patrick: And the simple answer is: lots of reasons. The donkey has played a central role in religion, colonization, warfare, and the economics of almost every major civilization since its domestication over 5000 years ago. It has symbolized everything from power, strength, and stupidity, to wisdom, piousness, and fertility—think A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Think Pinnochio. Think Shrek.
Milton: In our hyper-technological and neoliberal 21st century, the donkey seems out of place. Physical jobs it worked for millennia have been replaced by machines and the animal now promotes a nostalgia for pre-modern lifestyles.
Patrick: The donkey becomes an ideal character through which we can wrestle with questions that define our contemporary world: increasing numbers of unemployed manual labourers, capitalism, technology, technophobia, and worker’s rights.
Milton: Video games for most of their history in relation to other art forms, the donkey has also been deemed lesser than or second classed when compared to its relatives (we’re looking at you, horses…).
What does ‘Fringe’ signify for you?
Milton: I think Fringe signifies different things to different artists in different parts of the world—some are big and professionalized. Others are smaller and more adhoc or independent.
Patrick: For a long time, people told us that something like asses.masses couldn’t happen in a theatre. So it really was at the fringes of the art form. And even though we’ve now had opportunities to present the work in very big ‘central’ festivals, the work’s spirit still remains that of an outsider, trying to make space for a new type of shared experience within the history of theatre.
What would you like to say to the Istanbul Fringe audience?
Patrick: We’d say thank you so much for joining us at asses.masses. This year’s festival is the Turkish-language premiere and we’re very excited to bring the show to you in the language of the people.
Milton: You are about to embark on an epic adventure together. Over ten episodes, multiple meals, many players, and many more backseat drivers, you’ll bring to life the story of a herd of unemployed donkeys trying to make their way in a world set on forgetting them. You’ll also, we hope, meet new comrades and make more friends along the way. See you there!
[The Turkish version of this interview was published on unlimited.]
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