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May 18, 2011
HIGHRISE on BIG SCREENS

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It’s been a busy week at HIGHRISE, with two exciting public projections.

In Montreal, to a packed audience at the gorgeous L’Astral theatre, I had the honour of  “performing” HIGHRISE/Out My Window accompanied by 3 musicians, playing a live, improvised score. Sam Shalabi on oud, electronic guitar and electronics, Alexandre St-Onge on electric bass, upright bass and electrionics, and Will Eizlini on tabala and electronics. A magical evening, all part of the DNA Symposium at Concordia University, which was a heady mix of academics and practitioners, all discussing the intersection of Database, Narrative and Archives in the context of computer-generated story-telling. Thanks to the DNA team, and esp professors Monika Kin Gagnon and Matt Soar for creating this space for us.

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Meanwhile, in Toronto…

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…My colleagues represented HIGHRISE at the awesome annual Toronto the Good Party (put on by our partners and friends ERA Architects, Spacing Magazine and others). Technical Director Branden Bratuhin, Associate Producer Sarah Arruda, and Project Coordinator Paramita Nath talked all things HIGHRISE with good torontonians. They also gave a sneak peak (projected on the hallowed halls of Hart House) of our new project, One Millionth Tower, which we are describing for now, as a spacial film/web experience, built in HTML5 by Helios, popcorn provided by Mozilla Foundation.

We will be releasing a video documentary of the Montreal performance, and we’ll be telling you more about One Millionth Tower soon, so watch this space in coming weeks.

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photo credits:

Montreal performance by David Dufresne, duflab.com
Out My Window out DNA’s window, courtesy of DNA Symposium
Toronto the Good Party, by Paramita Nath

September 12, 2010
BACK TO SCHOOL FEELING

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It’s September, and HIGHRISE is in full swing.

Last week, I braved the stage at IGNITE TORONTO (presenters have 5 minutes, 20 slides with 15 seconds each). My subject was *THE SUBURBS: it’s not what I thought* and it was a runthrough of what i’ve learned from HIGHRISE so far. Check out this bootleg youtube vid someone posted of my presentation.

This week, I’m on a panel at the Interactive Ontario conference talking about Transmedia Storytelling with the great Siobhan Flynn moderating.

We also just got two academic invitations for next spring. In Montreal, the Concordia U. team at Ciner-G is organizing
an International Symposium on Nonlinear Digital Storytelling. Then, there’s a lab-symposium in Bristol on interactive documentary. The organizer, Sandra Gaudenzi, recently published this blog post about HIGHRISE, and asks some interesting questions about our project:

The blogger sez: “Although 360 technology is sexy, the point here is to know how it will be used. In her last project for NFB, Filmmaker-in-Residence, Katerina Cizek took very seriously the meaning of “collaborative” media. During 5 years she worked with the medical staff, and with the patients, of an inner-city hospital… and it is only through deep rooting into their universe that she emerged with the version of the interactive documentary that is available online – and on DVDs. I am really curious to know what type of collaboration she is experimenting with in her new project, Highrise. After having directly engaged with a selected group of tower residents in Toronto (see their descriptions of their space and the presentation that has been organized with Toronto’s major here), they are now asking everybody to send photos to Flickr… is this a contradiction or a cleverly balanced dose of crowd sourcing and intimate collaboration?
And also… is 360 degrees technology an aesthetic landscaped choice or does it experiment with new type of digital interaction? I am afraid that for now they are the only one to have the answers… maybe they want to share some information with us?”

Thanks for your questions, invitation and interest, Sandra. Once the work is up, it’ll be a lot easier to discuss many of these issues. Your questions are more about interpretation rather than simply about the intentions of the maker, so looking forward to launching and talking soon. Meanwhile, here’s a little blurb about HIGHRISE/Out My Window to give you a better feel for what we’ve been working on:

Out My Window is one of the world’s first interactive 360º documentaries. Delivered entirely on the web, it explores the state of our urban planet told by people who look out on the world from highrise windows.

It’s a journey around the globe through the most commonly built form of the last century: the concrete-slab residential tower. Meet remarkable highrise residents who harness the human spirit — and the power of community — to resurrect meaning amid the ruins of modernism.

With more than 90 minutes of material to explore, Out My Window features 49 stories from 13 cities, told in 13 languages, accompanied by a leading-edge music playlist.