A Media Artist's Response To Failing Diplomacy

When BriAnna Olson's pacifist views were confronted by an adamant American couple, she decided to heed their challenge and head to Tehran-- the epicenter of the Axis of Evil nation.

Amongst a landscape of failed diplomacy and media smear campaigns, she and fellow artist Michael Pope found a society far more alive and hospitable than they'd ever been led to believe.

Like jesters of a modern-day Magellan, they've returned with stories and insights to a culture few American's have seen first hand.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Tehran Avenue One-Shot Film Festival // Watch & Vote



From the website:

"TehranAvenue One-Shot Film Festival (TAFF) is a practical suggestion: To speak in a visual language that doesn't appeal to technological crutches and digital wizardry. This approach to the "image" attaches itself to simplicity. It doesn't need an editing table. The prerequisite is for the image-makers to acknowledge that image is just another form of inscription, like writing, which was once the domain of the learned. Many today have access to recording equipments, which have become the pen and paper of our world. The movie theater is no longer the only place where images circulate. As a friend put it, the number of recorded images far exceeds the number of bricks used in buildings. Another words, our world is an alloy of images. The power to make them is in the hands of a majority and yet those that dominate our visual field are made by a few advertising firms, which are control freaks, which leave nothing to accident, which only want to sell. Our public space is pockmarked by manufactured images that, much like billboards, are becoming more luminous by the day. They tell us what and how to be. We must break the monopoly of fashioned images, otherwise we wouldn't know what Saddam said and what his executioners said before the noose tightened. TAFF is a practical suggestion."

Signup to download the videos and vote for the winners.
Quicktime users will need to download the xvid codec, then install in Library/Quicktime/ folder. (Follow the readme file, I had to create the Quicktime folder) Also! Mac users! Use Safari, not Firefox... for some reason the download doesn't work with Firefox.

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