The Rainsin Truck Makes Raisins

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.

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, presentations and residencies that involve Raisin Truck and the Game Development Toolkit include: