A’21 amberNetworkFestival _ New Media Society The Dust to Come | انيميشن؛ تجربه

A’21 amberNetworkFestival _ New Media Society
The Dust to Come...
An Online/offline Screening program
Curated by New Media Society/ Parking Video Library

Friday March 19th 2021
17:00 CET (19:30 Time in Tehran)

Participating Artists:
Arash Khosronejad, Anahita Hekmat, Arash Hanaei, Nassrin Nasser, Maryam Katan /Shaahin Peymani, Elnaz Salehi, Milad Forouzandeh/Mohsen Hazrati, Nazanin Aharipour, Ramin Rahimi

“The Dust to Come..." is a video program with a series of experimental art films by contemporary Iranian artists and filmmakers curated by the New Media Society. Exploring futures and alternative visions and confusions. The program was previously shown in August 2020 at Mosaic Rooms’ Future Threads. The a’21 screening will take place both online (streaming via various channels) and offline in our project space in Tehran, To attend Tehran's event, please make sure that you are wearing your masks and keep a safe distance, there will be 2 screens indoor and outdoor for the visitor’s convenient and will follow by an online Q&A hosted on the festival’s website.
Was it ever our future? “The Removed Agency” got me by surprise when I received the invitation to contribute to the Future Threads Programme. A teenage sci-fi fan, who never watched Star Trek or Star Wars, I asked around from my artist, cinephile, and writer friends, and our conversations led to some interesting findings. On the surface, we don’t talk/write/speculate about the future, a few animated fantasies, a few novels dealing with alternative history, and some timeless dystopian theater play. And soon I realized I need to educate myself about video games and comic books. Not only we don’t write/create our takes on the future, but often being omitted from having a future in many other scenarios: in some films, the middle-east is consumed/destroyed, because of its natural resources, and/or appear in some war room’s wall map or flickering dots on a screen during a pandemic outbreak.
The future is blurry; we made countless Macro & Micro mistakes; we know the storm is inevitable; we watch science fiction, or we don’t… The future was never bright as they promised it to be, for some parts of the world are still as non-existent and discriminatory, as if it wasn’t pictured at all and never predicted.
See-through eyes, laser guns, and flying objects became killer drones, 3D Printing both an environmental threat and a cure for ventilator shortage.
The colorful plastic future once was pictured dreamy and chic but no one told us about the dust to come.
Amirali Ghasemi - August 2020
a’21 amberNetworkFestival will take place between the 10th of March & 16th of May 2021 at Oyoun in Berlin and the network nodes amberPlatform(Istanbul), Darağaç (Izmir), New Media Society (Tehran), DAH Project (Shiraz), KounAktif (Casablanca), BAAB (Khartoum), Shahraban (Baalbek), Bishkek Contemporary (Bishkek) and ADEF (Cairo, Berlin) currently. All the activities will be hybrid; in various locations and online at the same time.
a’21 is taking place in a very special time as a truly decentralized and international festival. We are developing the Collaborative (Network) Curation where the network members and invited artists are curating, creating, and performing collaboratively remotely along with the two-month-long festival.

More info:
https://newmediasoc.com/projects/dust-to-come

Streaming Links:
https://bbb.ambernetworkfestival.org/b/amb-lc6-u9h-e78
https://vimeo.com/oyoun
https://www.youtube.com/user/amberPlatform

New Media Projects:
No. 3, Araabi 3 Alley, Kheradmand-e Shomali St., Karimkhan Ave., Tehran