Milton Lim and Patrick Blenkarn
culturecapital is an arts trading card game and tournament-style performance that utilizes public funding figures, company budgets, and knowledge of cultural festivities/trends to critically engage with and celebrate the ways in which artistic value is created within our national culture economies. Created by Milton Lim and Patrick Blenkarn, the game takes municipal, provincial, and federal public funding data on performing arts companies over the last four years, ranks the numbers into categories, manifests in thousands of cards, and sets them loose within a competitive game that strives to accurately reflect our national performing arts ecology. The first version of the game used public funding data from western Canada to interrogate both the Canadian public funding system and the regional specificities of what makes a project in one province or city more ‘valuable’ than the same project elsewhere. Other versions of the project are currently being developed in Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal with the idea of creating a national version.
Originally trained in theatre and performance creation and often working in interdisciplinary settings, Lim and Blenkarn's ongoing collaborations serve as a framework to ask very specific questions about different kinds of value and how they interact within our current political climate. Their work has manifested in VR performance experiments, conceptual video games, object-based works and large participatory performance that borrows from theatre and e-sports.
Biography
Milton Lim is a Vancouver-based artist. His work is engaged with global politics, the cataloguing, the archiving and the indexing of public data, and resource allocation. These thematics interests are bolstered by a continues interest in game mechanics, typography architecture, and high-frequency content. He holds a BFA in theatre performance from Simon Fraser University. Milton is Co-Artistic Director of Hong Kong Exile, Co-Director of Gold Saucer Studio, and Artistic Associate with Theatre Conspiracy. He was the recipient of the 2016 Ray Michal Prize for Outstanding Body of Work and was the 2016-2018 Artist-in-Residence with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Patrick Blenkarn is a playwright, director, and interdisciplinary artist. His work includes performances for stages, streets, hotel rooms, and email inboxes, as well as card games, video games, short lms, books, and illustrations. His current projects interrogate labour, language, and the art economy. Patrick has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King’s College and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from Simon Fraser University.
Recent exhibitions
| 2018 | culturecapital, Micro-Performance Series; PEEK-Fest; Magnetic North Festival (Vancouver) |
Origin
Vancouver, Canada