Desire Line Sessions: Alumni Talks

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 the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), 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 the National Creation Fund from the National Arts Centre of Canada. Patrick has frequently been an artist in residence at galleries and theatres around the world, including 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. patrickblenkarn.com

Milton Lim (he/him) is a digital media artist, game designer, and performance creator. 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. 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), 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, artsdepot (London), Battersea Arts Centre (London), New Theatre Royal (Portsmouth), Strike a Light Festival (Gloucester), 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). 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 archive, and one of the co-creators behind culturecapital: the performing arts economy trading card game. In 2022, his work with Patrick Blenkarn on the asses.masses video game project received the National Creation Fund. Milton is doing an Artistic Leadership Residency with the National Theatre School of Canada. miltonlim.com

David Mesiha is a Toronto and Vancouver based award-winning music composer, sound/video designer, interdisciplinary artist and co-artistic director of Theatre Conspiracy. As a designer and theatre maker. His practice centres around examining questions of form in interactive and performance arts. His work has been presented at various national and international venues and festivals including, England, Scotland, Mexico and Argentina. His inter-disciplinary works integrate VR, AR and video game design in imagining new creative spaces that open dialog between visual arts traditions and those of the performing arts. He has worked on shows such as Project (X) by Leaky Heaven, Terminus by Pi Theatre, Foreign Radical by Theatre Conspiracy, You Should Have Stayed Home by Spiderweb Show and Crow’s Theatre 15 Dogs. He is also music composer, sound co-designer and created audio implementation for asses.masses a project conceived of and led by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. David has been nominated and won Jessie Richardson Awards in multiple categories and has received a Dora award nomination for his sound design work on Oraltorio by IFT theatre. David’s Same Difference by Theatre Conspiracy [An immersive performance installation] premiered in Vancouver in April 2022 and in Toronto at The Theatre Center February 2023 and will be presented by PuSh International Festival Jan 24th - 28th, Roundhouse - Vancouver. www.davidmesiha.com | www.conspiracy.ca