01 Oct Katerina Cizek | HIGHRISE: Digital Citizenship (working title)

The final major project to emerge from the National Film Board of Canada’s HIGHRISE,  DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP is a documentary and academic collaborative study investigating the invisible digital lives and stories of people living vertically around the world. From intimate whispers across skype, to the explosive political uses of whatsapp, how are relationships shifting between global cities, citizenship, and digital technologies? In this unprecedented joint project, produced by MIT Visiting Artist Katerina Cizek, documentarians work together with scholars and apartment residents to ask how new technological forms, their patterns of use and access, are reshaping the personal lives, political practices and citizenship claims of residents in an understudied but iconic space of the global city: the highrise. By questioning the ways in which digital technologies constrain as well as enable connection, this research explores the role of technologies in sustaining attachment but also creating new — and replicating old — division at multiple scales. Anticipated Launch: Spring 2015