Daniel Lichtman
The Raisin Truck Makes Raisins
2021-22
3D game/virtual environment
The Raisin Truck Makes Raisins is a collaboratively produced, 3D game that uses collage, spatial orientation and disorientation, and visual abstraction to reflect on the experience of caring for young children during pandemic and lockdown. Scenes in the game are produced in collaboration with a community that includes economically diverse, queer and immigrant care takers. The project explores a shifting combination of collective experience, individual experience, the experience of the caretaker and the experience of the child.
Collaborating care-takers contribute sketches, drawings, photos and sound recordings that reflect on their emotional relationship to the landscapes, objects and environments in which they care for children during the pandemic. 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.
More info: https://www.daniellichtman.com/raisintruck/
The Community Game Development Toolkit
Stills from collective worldbuilding workshops held at the SLSA (Society for Literature, Science and Art) Conference, Purdue University, 2022 and Museum Without Walls, Museu Sem Paredes / York University, 2022.
The Community Game Development Toolkit is a set of tools that make it easy and fun for students, artists, researchers and community members to create their own visually rich, interactive 3D environments and story-based games without the use of coding or other specialized game-design skills. Building on the popular 3D game design engine Unity, the toolkit provides intuitive tools for diverse communities to represent their own traditions, rituals and heritages through interactive, visual storytelling.
Over the course of these workshops, participants worked together to produce interactive 3D environments composed of audio recordings, drawings and photographic fragments of participants’ immediate, physical surroundings.
The toolkit is currently used to teach game design and virtual worldbuilding in numerous college programs across the country, and used by a growing community of artists and community members. In 2022-2023, the toolkit is supported by a NSF-funded REU at the Visualization and Virtual Reality Lab, Hunter College, CUNY.
More info: https://www.daniellichtman.com/toolkit/
Bio
Daniel Lichtman is an artist based in New York who works in games, creative platform development, coding and other media. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Studies at Stockton University.
See more from Daniel:
http://www.daniellichtman.com