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Starting Project 300 was an educational experience for me as well. Not only did I get to meet a lot of new artists that I never knew about before, but also I found some really good websites about the history of Persia in the process. One of them is Iran Chamber, which has an amazing amount of content on all aspects of Persian arts, culture, and history. It even has a nice section serving as a tourist guide to Iran. There's plenty of well organized information there for whoever wishes to know more about Iranian/Persian arts and history. It's a shame that their contact form doesn't seem to be working, as I would have loved to use some of their articles - with permission - for the articles section of the Project 300 site, but there seems to be no way of contacting them.

Tehran-based music band Hypernova, spearheaded by former Vancouverite -and friend of a friend- Raam, is in New York. Check out what they're up to. The music scene in Iran is quite complex, none of the music I have so far posted here is actually 'legal' in Iran. These artists can never officially release records and sell them in Iran. They can't have official concerts and gigs either. But they're music is still tolerated, and they distribute their music through their websites and play semi-private underground gigs. Still, what they do is almost entirely for the love of the music since they hardly make any money from it. Recently some of these bands have started selling their music on iTunes, but their target market is made up entirely of Iranians living abroad, since online shopping is practically impossible in Iran.

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I recently came across a couple of nice music videos. One of them, Tresses in the Wind, is shot in Iran and features Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, whose alleged private sex video was one of the biggest scandals in Iran last year. I think the video does a great job in conveying the mood it wishes to convey:

The second one is Kiosk's new music video, which uses some clever - if not terribly original - animation using old Iranian photographs:

I just finished work on the first version of the blog. It's still pretty rudimentary and I have to work on a lot of things (the commenting system is a mess!) but it's gotta do for now. I really wanted to get the blog up and running. So what's this blog about? I'm going to use this blog to bring news and information about all aspects of the Persian art scene. From news about current galleries and exhibitions to artist spotlights and interviews, to random links to cool stuff, this blog will have it all. As time goes by I'm hoping that more authors will join me so we can cover more stories. With the amazing response Project 300 has received so far, I don't think that's going to be too hard.

300themovie.info is an ongoing collaborative art project featuring art by artists using the theme of 'ancient Persia'. Driven by an admiration for arts, and united by a common concern about the barbaric and demonic portrayal of Persians in Frank Miller's graphic novel and the movie 300, we have come together to voice our objection in a uniquely artistic fashion. The call for art has just been released and we are still receiving the artworks.
If you are an artist and would like to participate, please send your art to submit at 300themovie dot info. You can join the growing list and link to us by copying the following line of code on your blog or website. According to technorati, 2,697 websites have already linked to our project page as of March 26, 2006.