Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise

This collaboration between documentary makers, highrise residents, academics, creative technologists, and theatre artists challenges conventional documentary storytelling through its blending of fictional elements and use of technology. The stories are accessible on all devices, but an enhanced version of Universe Within is available in WebGL for an in-browser 3D desktop experience.

The experience mimics personal and intimate "documentary conversations" between the viewer and host avatars, who are scripted and filmed in 3D point cloud data. Each host asks viewers questions; their answers take them to stories around the globe: to the West Bank, where Safa, a mother living in a highrise in Ramallah, has only Skype, phone, and email to stay connected with her family in Gaza, from whom she has been separated throughout most of her life by checkpoints and walls, though they only live a few miles away; to South Korea, where the teenaged boys who make up a team of world champion competitive video game players, live, work, and train together in a highrise compound in central Seoul; to Mumbai, where 18-year-old Deepti puts herself at risk to record audio at meetings with corrupt government officials in the hopes of saving her suburban-Mumbai apartment building from illegal demolition; and to Toronto, where two young refugees from Iraq living in a suburban highrise community join a "Girls Learning Code" programme to learn how to build video games, something their parents could not have imagined for them only a few months ago.

As the viewer journeys around the world, the host avatar wants to know more. Have the stories we have seen changed the way we feel about our own use of technology? Just how close are we to the people and places we care most about? Is the internet really fulfilling its promise of democratisation, and how is it entrenching the inequalities of our material world? Our responses determine which stories we get to see and which ones we don't. The result is a personalised experience that challenges our comfort in using digital technology to meaningfully engage with others, including those constructed solely of pixels.

As in a real-life conversation, not everything is revealed right from the beginning. The way in which the experience unfolds mirrors the way a conversation unfolds: You can't know the full extent of what someone might share with you. The complete Universe Within experience consists of 70 minutes' worth of stories, but it is broken into 15-minute-long units of storytelling, each one a unique conversation. At the end of each experience, the viewer is prompted to start over and begin another conversation, where he or she hears and sees different stories. If the same host is chosen, the conversation evolves; more aspects of the host avatar's own story are revealed.

The academic team chose three major sites, Toronto, Mumbai, and Singapore, for in-depth research. Their own work in this project will result in an experimental, avant-garde academic publication to be released in 2016. For more on the research process, see the video below. In addition, educational resources on Universe Within will be available in 2016; click here to check availability.

Technology, Rights.

Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise is the final chapter of the National Film Board of Canada's HIGHRISE project, an award-winning, multi-year, many-media collaborative documentary. (See Related Summaries, below.) The idea for this project began while the director, Katerina Cizek, was working on one of those documentaries, One Millionth Tower, at two highrise buildings in suburban Toronto, Canada. She says that she and her team "were spending a lot of time at the buildings....Residents hurried to their own apartments, rarely speaking with each other, much less with outsiders. We wondered about the digital lives and connectivity of the residents, so we decided to survey the building in a systematic way. Together with the academic team, we designed a participatory methodology, and we recruited a team of 14 residents to conduct a peer-to-peer survey of their neighbours, door-to-door throughout the building. Collectively, the researchers spoke 14 of the languages represented in the building, helping us to reach many residents who would not - or could not - speak with us. It was a great process to be a part of, seeing how a survey, when conducted by residents, could help neighbours get to know each other, and to begin working together to make their home a better place. The data gathered was fascinating. Ninety-three percent of those interviewed had not been born in Canada. More than 50 percent of the population was under the age of 20. Eighty percent of the households surveyed were connected to the Internet, despite the financial burden of doing so....It was also great to see how the data itself could empower the residents....[W]e made it a priority to share the data with the residents within a few weeks, and they immediately used it to successfully advocate for a much needed new playground for their children. That early fruitful research formed the basis for a much broader academic and documentary collaboration called Digital Citizenship in the Global Suburbs which later became UNIVERSE WITHIN."

Cizek says: "Technology is complex. On the one hand, it allows us to connect with people in an intimate and immediate way that is incredibly exciting and full of potential. But there is also the psychological impact of having strong feelings to a screen instead of to a person. It's these impacts that we have yet to learn and understand. Then there are the political implications of connecting into this network, which is a system of surveillance and control that we've all now become starkly aware of since Edward Snowden's NSA [National Security Agency] revelations and WikiLeaks....We need to be more conscious of how we move forward with these technologies - not just with digital technologies but also with the vertical technologies we now use to build our cities."