Daniel Lichtman is an artist, educator and organizer. Dan works in game-making, performance, video, coding and installation.

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The Rainsin Truck Makes Raisins

 

Video game / interactive virtual world

 

The Raisin Truck Makes Raisins is a series of interactive 3D landscapes that reflects on the experience of caring for young children during pandemic and lockdown. Each landscape is produced with care-takers from a variety of family, living and employment situations.

 

Audio-visual materials for Raisin Truck are based on a series of creative exercises with collaborators that reflect on their emotional relationship to the landscapes and environments in which they care for children during the pandemic. Based on these activities collaborators produce sketches, drawings, photos and sound recordings from their surrounding environment. Inspired by surrealist collage and techniques of exquisite corpse, these materials are collected together into a series of abstract landscapes that present a diverse range of experiences with childcare-in-isolation: busy, beautiful, frustrating and chaotic, marked by vulnerability, aggravation and resilience.

 

This project is based on the Community Game Development Toolkit, a set of game development tools that I designed that make it easy and fun for communities and individuals to create 3D environments and landscapes using their own drawings, collages, photos and other art materials. The goal of this toolkit is to provide a framework for diverse communities to collaboratively explore game design as a means for representing their own traditions, rituals and heritage, regardless of their access to technical skill.

 

More info about the Community Game Development Toolkit here.

 

Recent and upcoming exhibitions and presentations about Raisin Truck and the Game Development Toolbox include:

 

Image/video samples: