At a ceremony in New York City last night, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences handed out the 35th batch of News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Among the winners: A Short History of the Highrise, an interactive documentary on “vertical living” directed by Katerina Cizek, a member of MIT’s Visiting Artists Program, and co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Op-Docs section of The New York Times.
The executive producers of the project are Silva Basmajian at the National Film Board of Canada and Jason Spingarn-Koff at The New York Times. Spingarn-Koff is the newspaper’s commissioning editor for opinion video, and producer and curator for Op-Docs, the Times’ series of short opinion documentairies by independent filmmakers. He was a Knight Fellow at MIT in 2010-2011.
A Short History of the Highrise, which documents life in residential skyscrapers in cities and suburbs around the world, won the News & Documentary Emmy in the category New Approaches: Arts, Lifestyle, Culture. (The New York Times had a pretty good shot at winning the Emmy in this category, as it produced four out of the five nominated projects.) It’s both a series of four short films (“Mud,” “Concrete,” “Glass,” and “Home”) and a Web-based interactive experience, festooned with clickable, explorable sections that let viewers explore archival documents, text, and “microgames.”
Cizek’s multi-year Highrise project includes the earlier interactive documentaries Out My Window (2010) and One Millionth Tower (2011). At MIT, Cizek is working with Open Documentary Lab on the project’s next phase, HIGHRISE: Digital Citizenship, which – in the words of the Arts at MIT website – “investigates how new communication and media technologies are reshaping the personal lives, political practices and citizenship claims of highrise residents.”
A Short History of the Highrise got off the ground, so to speak, when Spingarn-Koff reached out to Cizek and the National Film Board of Canada about the idea of using The New York Times’ morgue as a resource for a film series driven by archival photographs. Spingarn-Koff is a longtime documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world Second Life, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
In a homecoming of sorts, Spingarn-Koff will be speaking to the Knight Fellows on October 9, the same day he’ll be featured as a panelist at a Communications Forum event organized by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program: Documentaries, Journalism, and the Future of Reality-Based Storytelling.
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