Living in a culture where every inch of our public space -- both off and online -- are crowded with images, it can be easy to assume we've become immune to their seductive messages. Instead, designer and filmmaker Sergio Toporek argues that the opposite is true.

At a recent CreativeMornings event in Vancouver, Toporek challenged members of the audience to question their assumptions about the power of images in their environments.

"Ancient cultures were very cautious about how they use representation. Today people believe themselves to be immune to their power but that belief actually makes us more vulnerable to representations."

A soft spoken street vendor has become the face of a new promotional campaign by Megaphone, a magazine sold on the streets of Vancouver.

The campaign called "I Work Here" features three videos of vendors on the job. In the first video projected yesterday at the intersection of Robson and Howe Streets in Vancouver's downtown core, we meet Peter Thompson, a 53 year-old former carpenter, who began selling the paper six days a week in 2006, to help make ends meet.

If you knew your neighbours' stories, would you relate to them differently?

That's the question at the core of a new multi-platform web project, Inside Stories, dedicated to Vancouver's South Hill neighbourhood, a diverse community whose residents have lived isolated from each other in part due to the many different languages they speak. The idea for the project came from a group of neighbours dedicated to breaking down barriers between each other.

When documentary film maker Nettie Wild was first approached to do a documentary about South Hill, she wasn't convinced film was the right medium to tell the story.