Kathleen Ruiz is a media artist who creates simulations, games, installations, sculpture and photography. Her work explores issues about perception, behavior, interaction and the confluence of the imaginary and the real, inviting inquiry into how conceptual constructs are built and how they serve to shape ethics and power. She provides us with simulated places where multiple viewpoints can be explored and expanded, while challenging us to simultaneously perceive the perspectives of the observer, the observed and the process of observation.
http://homepages.rpi.edu/~ruiz/
ruiz@rpi.edu
Ruiz is the founder, lead artist, designer, director and producer of Eco Resilience Games, where she leads a trans-disciplinary group of international student and faculty artists, computer scientists, game designers, writers, music composers, and engineers, working with biologists, geologists, and freshwater ecologists who are passionate about the environment and in making a lasting impact on emerging generations. Here art, games and ecological science come together for environmental knowledge preservation by creating virtual worlds that inspire us to preserve our actual one. Whether we are enabling people to experientially see, hear and touch plankton in new ways in order to understand their vital importance to freshwater ecology, or making it possible to become a water droplet traveling through an entire watershed, we are creatively using advanced game technology to introduce people to new worlds, new perspectives, and new systems to help understand and preserve emerging environmental knowledge and the vital need to work together globally for a sustainable, eco-resilient future. Please visit the Eco-Resilience Games: https://sites.google.com/view/eco-resilience/home
Grants awarded include NSF, NYFA, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Award, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Commission, New York State Council on the Arts exhibition grant, Experimental Television Center Grant, and the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist award. Her work was sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment in Europe and awarded a grant by the Department of Environmental Protection.
Ruiz's art has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums in the United States, Mexico, Europe, South America, and Asia and has been reviewed/published in the New York Times, Aperture, Art News, ARTI, Jornal do Brasil, The College Art Journal, The MIT Press, Reuters Video News International, Computer Graphics, Yale University Art Gallery, Wired, USA Today, arteTV, Kultur, TeknoKultura, and by Merrell, Thames and Hudson, IEEE, and others.
She is committed to using simulation technology to expand awareness of the human condition and has created research groups and projects in the following areas: CapAbility Games: simulation for differently-abled individuals; ErGoGenic Games: for health; and Eco Resilience Games: art and science games that engage both digitally and physically with field science observations and art making.