For about eight hours, participants of “asses.masses” sit in a theater, with a single PlayStation 4 controller sitting on a plinth in front of them. The controller is connected to a projected video game where 15 donkeys, or “asses,” have lost their jobs to machines. Only one audience member may use the controller at a time; who uses it and when is determined by the audience. 

The performance is in Boston for two nights only at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The first show was on Feb. 14 and another will take place on Feb. 21.

The goal of the video game is to guide the herd of asses through the journey of protesting the humans who have outsourced their jobs to machines. The game is played over 10 episodes, taking form in both 2D and 3D. Each ass has a different persona and each episode has various ways of playing out, depending on the audience’s decisions. 

Separate from the video game itself, “asses.masses” is a creative and intersectional opportunity for complete strangers to bond over the difficulty of making decisions as a single united group. 

The video game was co-directed by conceptual artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim and built by a team of developers in 2019, starting off as only one 20-minute episode. From there, it grew into an expansive narrative packed with cliffhangers and rotating character perspectives, where the audience might play a different ass based on the context of the episode.

Because both creators come from a background in “hardcore experimental performance,” as Blenkarn described it, “asses.masses” is different from the creations each creator has been part of in the past. 

“That’s us responding to what we feel like is the right way to tell a story and cultivate a particular political and social environment,” said Blenkarn in an interview with The Beacon.

This environment — the dynamic that each participating audience becomes a part of — has been intentionally designed to reflect social issues and elements of humanity in the name of collaboration. 

One of the original inspirations to focus on donkeys was a 15th-century woodcut of a donkey teaching a classroom of animals. According to Blenkarn, this image is what gave him and Lim the idea of putting a donkey in a position of power. 

“When we were making it, we were very conscious of this global position the donkey has. It’s an animal that’s in so many different cultural mythologies, lores, communities, and economies,” said Blenkarn. “We were really thinking about it as an economic keystone species for so much of human civilization.”

This theme of economic value is reflected in the fact that the herd of asses has lost their jobs to automation. But just in case that wasn’t enough, the structure of the show also symbolizes this by shuffling the normalized labor arrangements of a typical performance by giving the audience its own agency.

“The idea of the video game became a potent image to have on stage as a replacement for an actor,” said Lim. “So by asking everyone to become laborers in this, they effectively replace the performer on stage.”

In the early developmental stages of “asses.masses,” Blenkarn and Lim experimented with having audience members pass the controller to the left, which “was a specifically Marxist-y politic that we wanted to have,” Blenkarn said. The choice of using a PlayStation 4 controller was made to mimic the atmosphere of playing a video game in a friend’s living room with everyone watching you, rather than an arcade style interaction which could be perceived as more individualistic. 

Even the length of the performance itself, which wasn’t planned, turned out to be symbolic. 

“It just happily ended up being the length of an average work day, which we felt was serendipitous,” Blenkarn said. 

But the audience, the one factor of “asses.masses” that can’t be planned or predicted, is what tends to make each performance the most interesting. 

During the performance, Blenkarn, Lim, and any staff from the venue will not intervene with the performance, leaving the adventure up to the audience and the screen. 

“There is no Big Brother telling you how to operate, just a bunch of small brothers, and they’re all yelling, ‘Go left!’” said Blenkarn.

This reliance on community and the need to debate and determine the proper move for each proposition in the game has resulted in patterns of human response and behavior that Blenkarn and Lim have enjoyed observing. More often than not, they witness positive representations of how humans can work together to achieve a singular goal.

“We’ve seen really beautiful flourishes of camaraderie, open dialogue, democratic process, and people helping each other,” said Blenkarn. 

Since the performance’s debut, “asses.masses,” along with its co-directors, has traveled across the globe. Lim mentioned that when comparing how each unique audience responded to the experience, there are typically more similarities than differences — except when it comes to supporting small businesses. 

“There is a moment in the game when you have to make a manifesto and there is an option to put supporting small businesses on that manifesto. And that has only ever been considered an option in the United States,” said Blenkarn.

This act of finding the similarities despite perceived differences is a point that Lim emphasizes as the essence of the performance. There is no hidden lesson under the guise of an ass and tail in “asses.masses,” but more simply, a chance for individuals to explore what bridging across their differences could look like. 

“It’s about recognizing differences, rather than watching all the way through and saying, ‘Oh we’re all one now,’ because I think that’s the easy version of it,” said Lim. “But the complicated way, which our donkeys go through as well in the story of the show, is how do I love my neighbor even though we might disagree fundamentally on such different things?”