Venue Thoughts – The Salutation and the Union

The Salutation is a union run, traditional style pub within the perimeter of the All Saints campus. The upstairs room is available for hire and free for students, which is ideal for this project in order to maximise on materials.

From outside the salutation appears to be a quaint pub, surprisingly slap bam in the middle of the campus. This location is ideal as it’s a well known spot for a pint. It’s short walk from Uni means that anyone could come in on passing and join in with the event.

In interior of the salutation is a large ‘L’ shaped room with plenty of space to really spread out whilst working. The pub feel gained from the furniture and decor creates a relaxed, informal atmosphere, which would be perfect for our event, ensuring everyone feels like they’re enjoying doing the tasks at hand. The room comes with projector which could be used for our introduction, and perhaps to have some background music. The blend of both social and serious makes this an ideal venue for the workshop.

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The Union, meeting room 6, is a large minimalistic room on the third floor of the new MMU union.
Being right next to university, thus not needing to travel, would really work in our favour. We would also be able to inform people of it’s happening as they enter the union to catch anyone who is interested.

Most people associate the Union as a haven for all things cheap. Somewhere to chill. However upstairs there are large spaces ideal for working, modern and bright with plenty of wall and surface space. I went to have a look round earlier, took some photos and posed it to the group. The meeting room has a sliding rear wall which allows it to merge with the room next door, perfect for when the event gets busy and we need more space. There is also a large projector which is something we have decided is essential for the workshop. I feel like this is one of the best venues we have seen.

Venue Thoughts – Kraak Gallery, MMU Old Union and Anthony Burgess Foundation

Over the past couple of days I have contacted a few different venues which all had potential.

Firstly, Kraak Gallery. Located on Little Lever Street, a back alley of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, it’s hidden away location would be be great for an ‘underground’ workshop.

Inside the venue boasts large gallery and event spaces which would be perfect for the workshop. The space is a blank canvas which would allow us to decorate to fit to the event, but still known for it’s creative uses.This venue seemed ideal so I emailed the events manager to find out the costs, and any restrictions that come with the venue. He replied telling me that it was £40 for the evening plus £50 for a sound engineer. We have decided that we don’t need a sound engineer, so the price is good for the venue: this is definitely on the short list.

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Secondly, the old MMU union on Oxford Road. I thought this might be a good idea because it currently stands unused, meaning that it would be exclusivly our workshop using the space.

The space inside is large, with plenty of tables and surface space which would be perfect for people to spread out and create some really interesting pieces! This was a frontrunner in terms of venues, that was until I was told that the old union can no longer be used.

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Finally, I contacted the Anthony Burgess Foundation. On Gloucester Street it’s based really close to University and Student Halls. This building is used by both other exibitionists and for talks and informal lectures/workshops, which suggests that it would also work for our work shop.

The response was incredibly helpful and explained all of the things that were included in the price. I found out that it was £150+VAT for the venue, mics, projector, screens, stage and the opening and staffing of the bar. Although the price included all of the things that we needed and the inside was perfect for putting up our briefs, it was still to expensive; unfortunately ruling it out.

Aesthetic Research

Here are some examples of the kind of aesthetic that I want to go for. I’m hoping to go for a very governmental aesthetic, to make our magazine look as if it were a dossier that has been declassified or stolen from the government, in order to spread this information to the public.

    

Venue Thoughts – Brunswick Mill

Whilst doing work Lee suggested Brunswick Mill as a potential venue for our workshop. Brunswick Mill is an old industrial mill on Bradford Road in Ancoats, which has been renovated and is now used as rehearsal space for bands and performers.

Upon arrival we thought the exterior of the building looked perfect for the concept of the magazine. The run down and almost abandoned look of the building really would create the feeling of secrecy, really corresponds with the ‘underground’ portrait of the magazine and everything that it’s about.

The inside space, however, wasn’t as promising. all of the rooms were quite cramped which would be restricting for us in terms of what we could do and how many people could attend. As you can see from the above picture there isn’t that much room when the space is occupied, and we suspect we will need a lot of table space. As well as this the space is neither free to use or in a convenient location.
After viewing this venue we deemed it as no contention.

Venue Thoughts – Revolution Fallowfield

This week my aim is to find the perfect venue in which to hold our workshop and coincidentally, whilst out for a drink, I noticed that Revolution offers free room hire for students. Revolution is a well known bar located right in the heart of Fallowfield, Manchester’s busy student area.

My first thought was that it’s location could be advantageous, considering the large footfall of Students who would be both passing by and coming in for a drink and a bite to eat, especially on weekend evenings. As well as it’s location, Revolution has other promising aspects. For example the fact that it’s a bar could work in our favour as it would add a social aspect to the workshop, which in turn could attract more students for us to collaborate with on the magazine’s content. Furthermore, because it is free to hire the space, we would have more money to spend on materials for people to use for their work, giving the magazine a real diversity of content.

I contacted the manager and asked to look around the upstairs room to gauge it’s usability, and to see to what extent it suited our requirements. Despite it’s undeniable speciousness, the room doesn’t meet a few of the key criteria which were imperative for the workshop. Firstly the trendy interior, albeit great for a party or a function, don’t fit with the ‘underground’ image of the magazine. The walls are fully decorated, not leaving much room for us to post up key information and briefs for people to read  in order to gain inspiration and a full understanding of the subject matter. As well as this we have recently been coming up with various ways in which we could introduce the workshop. Our strongest ideas being a short video, or a skype call, from a character who is leading the underground movement against censorship; this poses the problem that we would need a projector or some kind of screen which Revolution can not provide. The final disadvantage of Revolution was that it isn’t close to University, when the bulk of our advertising for the event will, most likely be around the art building. The distance could deter people, especially any interested first year who don’t live in Fallowfield.

Interim Pitch

Today we had our interim pitch before we go away for easter break. The pitch is meant to see what stage we’re up to, and to get an accurate picture of what our magazine could look like, at this half way stage. We wanted to accurately portray the enigmatic theme of our magazine in the pitch. So we decided that we would remain silent through the pitch and let our secretive invitations express our ideas for us before opening up for questions. In the envelopes we gave to the tutors, we included a morse code cheat sheet and black paper with holes in to decipher the hidden information in our letter.

We haven’t actually written the name of our magazine (Black Market) anywhere in anything we have done so far, as we’re hoping to create an identity for ourselves using encryption methods (secret messages, morse code, potentially looking at shorthand codebreaking later on).

The presentation was very well received by the tutors (Liz and Jon), and both were able to understand our concept purely from the invitation letter. This shows that our project has come leaps and bounds since our initial pitch with Sue and Dan. The tutors also seemed impressed by our presentation style for this pitch.

The feedback we received was that we should keep going with the formal and official look, and plan our workshop soon.

Encrypted Letter Envelopes

We’ve been experimenting today with stenciling our logo onto the envelopes to give them a very lo-fi aesthetic. If we make boxes around uni to decipher the messages in, we could print our logos onto that, too, to make it easier for users to make a connection between the two.

Encrypted Message Invitation

We had this idea to create an invitation with an encrypted message on in order to market our event, and to show off in our pitch today. This is what I have come up with.

Within this letter, I have hidden the information regarding the date, time, and place of the function we’re going to hold. Our intention right now is to make boxes to put around university that the letters can be put into to reveal the secret information contained. We’ve also considered sticking tape or vinyl stickers to windows around university that would highlight the information, if the reader held the letter up to the window and aligned.

We’re planning to place these letters around university in envelopes printed with our logo, hoping that people will be interested enough to open them and decipher our message.

The problem we’re facing, though, is that we’re concerned that people may not understand that there is information hidden in the letter to find or that the boxes around university are there for that purpose. So  need to find a way that people can easily decipher the message with everything we give them in the envelope, whilst maintaining the secretive aesthetic. We don’t want to include a sheet with holes cut out of it, as there wouldn’t be any point encrypting that information, then.
I’m hoping to create an aesthetic that makes our organisation look like a professional, and authoritive organisation, dedicated to removing censors and securing freedom of information. In an attempt to look like an official government body, I have modeled our letter on a declassified letter I took from the Ministry of Defence regarding DA-Notices within the United Kingdom. I have even adopted the font they use (Transport – Kinneir and Calvert) as our official font for our magazine. Transport was originally designed for use on road signs in the UK, but as of last year, has been adopted by the government as an official font, as it is considered more readable.

Global Surveillance Scandal

We’ve been researching as a group today to try and find some suitable topics to feature in our magazine and have come up with a solution.

In June 2013, an unknown US citizen blew the whistle on a shocking global surveillance conspiracy run by the US and UK governments. The citizen, Edward Snowden, had been working as a private contractor as a data specialist for the NSA and had uncovered a mass amount of documents relating to this surveillance. Snowden began leaking this information through The Guardian newspaper. These documents allege that the UK and USA were engaged in an agreement to collect data (internet traffic, phone usage, e-mail data, etc.) from the other nations citizens that they would later share, as a way of circumventing domestic surveillance restrictions. The alliance they formed (along with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) is also alleged to have worked in conjunction with known dictators, collect data from other nations, and spy on government and UN officials all over the world. As soon as the news broke, the UK government issued what is known as a DA Notice on the story, effectively silencing any reports by British media on the topic.

The Guardian were reporting on this story despite the DA Notice from the government at first. But in January 2014 under instruction from David Cameron, two GCHQ technicians strong armed their way into The Guardian’s London HQ and forced them to destroy their own hard drives. This is after over 100 communications between The Guardian and the government, with the government on several occassions threatening to have the newspaper closed down, despite the fact that DA Notices are completely voluntary and the newspaper broke no laws. The Guardian now no longer report on the story in the UK, meaning that the British people have no way of knowing what’s going on. We believe that the public have a right to hear about this scandal.

Five Fingers • Five Continents • One Voice

We’ve adopted a mantra for our group, as kind of a call to arms for those who are (or want to be) part of our project.

Five Fingers • Five Continents • One Voice

The phrase is inspired by the thought that went into creating our logo. Five fingers of the workers hand, five continents of people, one voice to bring them together.