Another day o' our voyage! With bottled messages from our captains, our group walked around the city centre seeking out hidden gems.

The crew, lead by Tim 'Salty' Spiller. An overview of our pirate code of conduct, with the main themes being to avoid commercial chains, and sail the cityscape by alternative means of transport.

Day 1 o' our pirate journey! We met our shipmates, and discussed what it meant to be pirate in this age. We proceeded to draw up our Jolly Roger, basing it on the Mancunion worker bee, with a fearsome twist. Now to prepare ourselves for t' rough trip around the seas o' Manchester!

Personal Scroll:
Despite being abandoned by my crew, I can see they be workin' hard.....I hope to set sail with them, as a deck hand....will hope to earn that right to get my sea legs....

First day as a pirate and our first task was to create a flag and pirate persona and group. We took the name the invisible visible because our pirate code centred around finding the real manchester off the beaten track.

We started our aimless wandering today with the aid of bottled messages and got ourselves wonderfully lost.

Day 6: Winds be pickin' up, time to gather the stores and supplies before we make sail once more.
Repairs be made and we be trading all we have for scrolls and maps to show us where to voyage in the future.....we need to make our marks to leave the path for our treasure we've already found, our memories be blurry after plenty o' grogg!!
We planning on being ready for the winds by Moneday, pray for our souls.

BEHOLD the edge of the earth! This is the space I chose as my hidden treasure. The area is an almost no mans land like space on the boarder of salford and manchester.

Today we started to wonder the streets and tried to discover the hidden and real manchester. The canals showed what was behind the street scenes and facades that the city didn't want people to see.

Day 3: We retraced our steps to our hidden treasures. We investigated and explored to create a narrative based on the context of the space that we had chosen.

Day 2: Exploring the city. Going to places we wouldn't normally go to. To find spaces that are hidden within the obvious parts of the city.

Day 1: Our pirate flag and what we stand for. Finding the invisible hidden in the visible

Looking back through time has enabled me to rediscover and understand my chosen site and subsequently develop a narrative to my map.

The Town Hall and Albert Square proved a popular key place for locals and has become the central site for my treasure map.

Our first clue instructed us to interact with the public in order to seek out the heart of Manchester. We were led on a great voyage around the city.

Breaking into crews, discovering our pirate personas, and creating our code was first on the agenda.

We opened our first bottle message and it was to find "X"; therefore i choose this corner site contains four different of roads each leads to different direction and make a sketch.

On day two, we went to City Center and found out trees on side of Road with carved messages, and taking down notes of what our bottles tried to lead us to...

Day 5 - Feasting on churros is proving little comfort as its very windy weather up the crow's nest. Getting footage for my surveillance themed film is proving wetter than predicted.

Day 5: The wind has changed.....time to put in for port mateys!! We have plenty o' repairing and fixin' to be doing. Due to recent failings, mutany is the call, and for new maps to be made for thar treasure....our ship now! And our maps for our secret coves

Mapping presentation:

Captain Matt 'Shivers' Shanley presented various and creative ways in which information and places can be documented. This included, emotional mapping, information in the form of visual perspectives and a interactive digital mapping on a building. This gave our crewmates ideas to begin their mapping workshop.

Day 4 - On the way to finding more churros, I realise that our pirate activities are being monitored at every step. I decide to focus on our constant surveillance in my 'mapping' film.

Exploring the narrative:

The Plankers crew started to create a narrative of their chosen sites. Creating a narrative brought a better understanding of the relationship between different spaces and how they can be reinterpreted into a interesting moments.

Day 3 - Supply of churros running low, but nonetheless we continue our voyage of exploration, we visit individual sites of buried treasure. My site is higher than the Crow's Nest on our ship and you can see all across Manchester. I decide to record my 'map' of exploration through film.

Day 2 - After feasting on many churros, we embark on our journey of urban exploration. Following bottled messages we venture across Manchester in search of treasure, sometimes we even need the help of the natives.

Day 1 - We are the 'Los Diablos del Churros', Mexican urban pirates on the eternal search for churros. We follow our pirate code strictly, explore the city in abstract ways, and we have no care for the environment!

The Little Philosopher who lives in a forgotten duck house is supposed to know answers for all our questions… If he tells us where the plank is, we will be able to pass through the Philosophers' Portal to another dimension and (hopefully) find our ship there!
(a preliminary attempt at re-imagining my site)
Mad Jenny Kidd

As our back story quite naturally emerged while we were exploring Manchester, we decided to develop it further as a team. We used messages in the bottles as a starting point and choose four sites of significant importance to our narrative. In this way, each member of a crew got one site and is supposed develop a sub-story backing our overall narrative.
Mad Jenny Kidd

Following messages in the bottles given to us by the Captain (before he died as result of being wounded by the Famous Mancunian Piccadilly Fountain Monster), we found ourselves drifting through a city. After coming back to the Port and finding out that our ship has disappeared, we realised that the plank is a key to find it.
Mad Jenny Kidd

We call ourselves the Plankers, as we walk the plank and fall to explore the city! We follow our harts and (usually) get lost and through aimless wandering we experience and assimilate various phenomena of urban conditions. We are ready to drop the anchor in Manchester and start our journey...
Mad Jenny Kidd

Revisiting our areas of interest, connecting the dots of our backstory and arguing passionately with a lot of laughter, we each chose a site. Mine, the Roman Ruins of the old fort that once marked the beginning of the city.
The port will remain a port, even if it gets drowned by land.
Andrea 'The Fox' Piers

After a visit at the Sackville St. Building on the North Campus, we set off to explore the city with the company of four messages that would direct our exploration.
The message has a different message for everyone; even though they are not aware of its existence.
Andrea 'The Fox' Piers

On the 30th of April all pirate crews assembled.
Ours, 'The Plankers'. The Code: Follow your heart and get lost; let the streets take you for a walk and that's exactly what we did.

Andrea 'The Fox' Piers.

My hidden treasure was hard to choose between so many tempting choices. But I selected the basin next to Bridgewater Hall where we discovered some homeless people on the second visit, in addition to the rubbish I saw at a closer look underneath the water surface. This inspired me to create a narrative around the world as we perceive it on first sight and how we want to see it (upperworld) and the rubbish that is discarded and the people we do not want to accept as part of our society (underworld).

For our second day we set off in our crews after a talk from Morage Rose and walked through the city to find the city's hidden treasure. Bottled messages gave us hints what to do next. Our last instruction was to walk to "the edge of the world" and to cross it if we dared to. So we crossed the bridge to Salford...

During the first session we listened to an introduction talk by Emily Crompton and afterwards generated our pirate code in our crews. May I introduce myself: Lea Sharkbait from the "Invisible Visible".

DROPPING THE SAILS
The voyages across the city led the crews to lost and forgotten spaces within the city. Might these spaces contain treasure?

The Lost Philosophers

As the crew (The plankers) journeyed through the sites, they came across a art project that explored portraiture. The photographs displayed transformed into The Plankers finding photos of the 'lost philosophers', a group that disappeared into the alternate world of reality.

One of the bottled tasks, opened at the canal below Oxford Road.

Dropping Sail // The pirate tasks lead students to think about their chosen space, moment or instance in the city. This would be the place to form their narrative and ultimately their mapping output.

Day 3 - After finding interesting features within the city, we located 4 sites to be used within our maps. My site was Bow Lane. The emergency staircase reminded me of a link bridge, connecting to the building opposite.

In the silent space
Beneath the chundering and thundering
of Oxford Road
and the heavy weight of lives being lived
On his lamp-lit web
The spider sleeps

- Cap'n Long John Lovejoy

CLIMBING THE CROWS NEST
Guided by naught but their wits and a few messages in bottles that had washed ashore, the pirate crews set out on a voyage across the wild seas of Manchester.

Day 2 - After a talk from the Loiterers Resistance Movement, we were each given a bottle containing a secret task. We walked around the city to find hidden treasures, completing our tasks along the way.

BOARDING THE SHIP
Before embarkin' on our foolhardy voyage, we formed ourselves into crews. Each crew developed their own pirate code, designed a flag and named their vessel.

A different view of the city // Our explorations lead us to find our own undiscovered treasure. Our perceptions of the city began to change and we sought out an alternate outlook.

Our Crew came across a interstitial space along Deansgate that was defined by a enclosure of trees. This served as a starting point for the crews narrative, a reinterpretation of the space as a 'path of symbols' that contained a key subplot to the overall narrative.

Day 1 - We began by splitting into crews of 4, creating team flags that symbolised our 'pirate' agendas.

Messages in a bottle // A collection of bottles washed up on the shores of the city, with an array of the pirate tasks to be undertaken. Each student chose a bottle and discover the task that lay ahead.

Seek and ye shall find.. // Our voyage across Manchester began with seeking out paths. We started to unravel the hidden treasure of the city and document it in our method of choice.

X Marks the spot! Day 2 of our events saw the students exploring the city of Manchester through a series of set tasks. The tasks were created to help the students reinterpret their surroundings; starting to create a narrative..

FEATHERSWORD decorating the Flag // The crews chose their pirate names, adopted their persona and boarded each ship, christening their boats with new names - my crew became Mexican Pirates and named the boat ‘Los Diablos de Churros’ (The Devils of Doughnuts). Each crew created their own pirate code and designed a flag to represent the crew.

Day 1: Boarding the ship

Talk by Emily Crompton on behalf of Urbed about the use of mapping and narrative in urban design. The talk provided a introduction to how mapping helps structure design practice.

Day 4: Our arty shipmates from other lands weighed anchor on this morn. We had one of the landlubbers talk to us about what they be doin'.
We is focused on telling our tales, helping other shipmates follow our bearings.

Personal Scroll:
This view from the crows nest shows how landlocked we be, my heart is still on the fare seas, drifting, as wash....I feel uncomfortable in such surroundings, worrying about the Trading Company seeking me out and hanging me!

Personal Scroll:
I found this hole in the bow of the ship today, with another on the other side....worrying cause it means we have rats!! The food is not safe no more, we must put in to port as soon as the wind is right, for these pathways through our ship for these horrible vermin be a danger to our health!

Day 3: The survy seas force us into a rowing boat, to explore the buried treasures found by thar crew.
We found many strange sights and met a few willing shipmates for the future!
This be our first treasure, along the shipway of Bridgewater. We navigated further down this pathway, and found more treasures, each of which will make a fine tale for the Captain's table.

Day 2: after forcing the crew to walk the plank, we got them thinking about the city through different lenses.....this began with us stopping in the city and creating stories for passing survy shipmates!
This was followed by our crews investigating the seas on their own, seeking out ye buried treasure

Day 1: Heavy seas, introduction session, discussion of our names, which on the QUEEN BEE be:
Captain: Tim 'Salty' Spiller,
Shipmates: 'Dorsal' Paul Fuller, Thomas 'Walker D. Plank' Kirk, Humera 'Clueless Morgan' Hussain, Rosa 'Misty Leadblade' Wood.
This was supplimented with our Code of Pirateship!!

Follow our internal compass and let the bottle leads the way where we belongs to