Exciting news from overseas! The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentarian Katerina Cizek will be working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenDocLab , the first-ever collaboration between two pioneering interactive media organisations.
The scope of the project is to develop the next production in the NFB’s multi-award-winning HIGHRISE documentary project – a multi-year, multimedia, collaborative documentary experiment that explores the human experience in global vertical suburbs. As OpenDocLab bring together technologists, storytellers and scholars, it will be very interesting to see what they produce.
This joint project grew out of discussions between HIGHRISE producer Gerry Flahive of the NFB, Prof. William Uricchio, principal investigator of MIT OpenDocLab, and Sarah Wolozin, OpenDocLab director, on how their organizations could pool their creative talents to explore new ways of telling stories and harness the NFB’s expertise in taking an artistic approach to new communications technologies.
“We are thrilled that Kat Cizek will be joining us. It will be interesting to see how MIT’s research informs Kat’s storytelling and the HIGHRISE project, and vice versa. This residency will give Kat and our researchers the time to explore the potential of new technologies and methodologies to enable participatory and data-driven storytelling. We look forward to a rich exchange,” said Sarah Wolozin.
Cizek will work with scholars and apartment residents to ask how new technological forms are reshaping the personal lives of residents in an understudied but iconic space of the global city: the suburban high-rise community. Cizek’s work at MIT is slated to wrap in mid-2014.
About MIT’s Visiting Artists Program
The arts have been an integral part of MIT since the 1960s. The Visiting Artists Program brings internationally acclaimed artists to engage with MIT’s creative community in ways that are mutually enlightening for the artists and faculty, students and research staff at the Institute. The program has sponsored visits by Tomás Saraceno, Vik Muniz, Gustavo Dudamel, Trevor Paglen, Cai Guo-Qiang, Junot Díaz, Jason Moran and Bill Viola. In this series, the Visiting Artists Program offers a rich exchange of ideas, problem-solving and creative dialogues within the community.