Christie/CAFKA Artist in Residence Program: Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli

London-based artists Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli were resident artists this past year in the Christie/CAFKA artist-in-residence program in Kitchener, Ontario, where they began development of a new piece they call In Search of Abandoned. Working with Christie Digital’s immersive virtual reality cave and using heightmap data, game engine technology and dynamic sound, they created an interactive three-dimensional stereoscopic landscape.

The project, which is based on Bruno Martelli's trip to the arctic island of Svalbard, has included collaborators Dustin Freeman of Toronto and David Jensenius of Kitchener as well as support from Christie staff Charles Fraresso, Jordan Priede and University of Waterloo co-op student Jeremy Sioui.

Gibson and Martelli work with the technologies and formal devices of video gaming to explore ideas of the sublime. As artists they fuse the products of the enormously popular gaming industry with their humanistic vision. Their application of the gaming vernacular speaks to our contemporary preoccupation with screen-based and interactive technologies in our search for meaning and mediated experience. Gibson and Martelli’s work pushes both the capacity of cutting edge visualization technology and our understanding of where contemporary art can take us.