Real Fresh TV | Social Media, Multi-Platform Marketing and Internet TV Specialists

NOISE Lab – Manchester’s Audacious Pop Up Store For Creative City Centre Urbanites

Posted on 01. Feb, 2010 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Events, Inspired

T-shirt: Mark Wigan creation on sale at NOISE Lab

I really enjoyed last Thursday’s launch of the NOISE Lab, a ‘guerilla arts pop up store’ nestled opposite the Orange Shop and next to Boots the Chemists right on the Great Manchester High Street aka Market Street.

Situated in the former Shelly’s footwear outlet, next to Schuh and in prime shopping centre real estate, this incredibly bold 6 month long ‘experiment’ is born out of the national NOISEFestival.com project, an online community where young creatives in film, music, visual arts and many other creative disciplines develop and showcase their (first, in many cases) online portfolio.

With NOISE Lab, these extremely talented young people can sell their unique, one-off creations in a real shop on a real high street!  From the NOISE Lab website:

Supported by Manchester City Council the NOISE Free Arts Lab takes over an empty retail premises on the city’s busiest shopping hotspots. This free and innovative space:

• Offers creative folk aged 30 and under, registered on www.NOISEfestival.com to sell original work such as clothes, CDs, jewellery, ceramics, photographs and accessories
• Licenses work from artists registered on www.NOISEfestival.com, to produce a line of exclusive NOISE prints, postcards, t-shirts, bags and other printed items which will be on sale – which means if you haven’t got the backing to get a product on the shelves NOISE will help in get your stuff out there.

And there’s more, a Cafe, to be precise. From the NOISE Lab website:

Not just content with taking NOISE all retail, there’s even a Caf in the Lab for you to kick back, have a brew and take a minute out your busy day.

There’s also Free Wi-Fi on offer, which makes The Cafe the ideal spot for you set up your own meetings (minus the suits and spreadsheets), blog, tweet or revise.

The Cafe staff have been recruited through catering and hospitality courses at The Manchester College and through the ‘Back to Work’ courses that works with people who have recently been made unemployed that want to get back to work.

Here’s a quick NOISE Lab walkthrough video taken at the launch on Thursday night:

I’ve written about NOISEfestival in the past, covering their Creative Futures event at Manchester Town Hall in November 2008, and it’s great to see that through NOISE Lab, Manchester has taken the bold step to do something as audacious as this at a time when many would least expect or perhaps even advise it.

At a Leadership Lab event for the city’s arts and cultural sector last Tuesday, I actually heard about a similar project being planned spearheaded for the Birmingham Bullring shopping centre by the Created in Birmingham team and am quietly chuffed that Manchester got in first!

Anyway, back to Thursday night’s event.

The NOISE Lab launch, curated by Manchester visual arts supremo Barney Doodlebug and opened by the leader of Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese, was a convivial affair.

Uniquely Mancunian with musicians like Elbow’s Guy Garvey and jazz saxophonist and hip hop artist Soweto Kinch mingling with uber creatives like Contact Theatre’s CEO and former rapper with Outkast and The Roots, Baba Israel and graffiti wunderkinds like Andrew Tunney (behind the sadly no more seminal graffiti session cum monthly Contact meetup, Sketch City), it was perhaps the most interesting event I’ve ever been to in a former shoe shop of which I have fond memories!

I filmed a couple more videos at the event with my trusty Flip Mino HD video camera.

The first is the last 5 minutes of Sir Richard Leese’s opening speech.

I’ve never heard him before and met him briefly whilst chatting to Manchester Knowledge Capital’s Coral Grainger and Manchester City Council’s Head of Cultural Strategy, Lyn Barbour who I know from Real Fresh TV’s early beginnings when she was director of the sadly missed Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS).

I enjoyed Sir Richard Leese’s very pragmatic view on the NOISE Lab being an experiment that had a future beyond being a ‘recession/empty shop project’ if it proved successful.

Here comes the video..!

What I really enjoy about every NOISE event I go to is the real sense of community and openness to collaboration evident in the way things are doing at NOISE.

The NOISE Lab launch was no different.  Here’s a very brief video interview I filmed with an up and coming Manchester-based video blogger and singer songwriter at the launch called Thallie.

Protege of record producer Johnny Jay “acclaimed King of the Manc remixers in the early ’90’s”, she combines comedy writing for an aspiring R&B diva alter-ego with writing and performing her own songs, soon to be released on was the Manchester-based Modern English label.

I’ve asked the Modern English gang to come down to the Social Media Cafe Manchester event on Tuesday at which I happen to be sharing a long-awaited update to 7 Wonders in 7 days, my social media powered round-the-world charity fundraising trip.

I think the social media scene in Manchester has a lot to learn from their energy and ingenuity!

What do you think?  Where you at the NOISE Lab launch?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Related posts:

1. The Case for Manchester Open Data City and the Joys of Courting Corporate Philanthropy
2. A Day in The Life of A Digital Native – NOISEfestival
3. Jotta, online community for artists and creatives – Social Media for the arts?
4. A Touch of Liveblogging from Manchester Social Media Cafe
5. b.TWEEN08 conference, PUMA Manchester Exclusive Gig And More

Tags: Andrew Tunney, Baba Israel, Barney Doodlebug, Birmingham Bullring, Contact Theatre, Coral Grainger and Manchester City Council, Created in Birmingham, Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS), Elbow, Flip Mino HD, Guy Garvey, Johnny Jay, Lyn Barbour, Manchester Knowledge Capital, Manchester Market Street, Mark Wigan, Modern English, NOISE Free Arts Lab, NOISE Lab, NOISEfestival, NOISEfestival.com, Sir Richard Leese, Sketch City, Social Media Cafe Manchester event, social media UK, Soweto Kinch, Thallie