Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention 2012, Manchester, Saturday May 19

Far from becoming obsolete now anyone can freely share anything anywhere, anytime online, the fanzine is thriving in the age of digital culture, from the simplest photocopied diary-style zine to lavish artists' books and zines created especially for Kindle. The first Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention, held during Future Everything in 2011, looked at how self-publishers can harness digital technology to enhance and work alongside the printed word, using the two formats to engage and cross-promote between different audiences.

The second Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention will look at how the virtual world is allowing networks of zine makers to share publications, news and experiences all over the world. There will be a small charge of £2 to enter the building as a Future Everything venue.

Talks 

'Making a noise: An express ride through the world of punk and riot grrrl fanzines and the UK feminist underground, 1977-2012': Cazz Blase

Cazz Blase wrote the fanzine Aggamengmong Moggie between 1993-1999, Real Girls in 2001 and Harlot's Progress between 2002 - 2006. Along with Holly Combe, she is one of two music review editors at The F-Word website, for which she has written extensively about both women and the UK punk scene and the UK riot grrrl scene. She was a contributing author to the book Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now! (Black Dog Publishing, 2007). Cazz is from Stockport and blogs about Manchester and Greater Manchester at http://toolateforcake.wordpress.com. She works as a library assistant at Manchester University.

'Pam Ponders Paul Morley's Cat: The Wired and Wonderful World of City Fun': David Wilkinson

David Wilkinson is a writer, musician, public librarian and PhD student working on the politics of British post-punk. City Fun was a Mancunian countercultural publication founded by Andy Zero in 1978. After Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll joined the editorial team, it became the city's dominant post-punk paper until it folded in 1984.

Closed Caption/Rotherham Zine Library

Closed Caption aims to make subversive content through appropriation. This new group, which now replaces Rotherham Zine Library, will make zines that twist found content to create new meaning and revel in the absurdity of social norms. Closed Caption intend to use the zine library as a resource and are looking at how they can add their collection to existing events and places to create interesting new ways to read zines. They also hope to develop the collection by trading zines with others around the world.

Film

Watch Salford Zine Library's 2011 film Self Publishers of the World Take-over, which features self-publishers from all over the world talking about their work. The screening will be followed by a Q and A with director Craig John Barr.

Tours

Visitors will be able to take tours of the building for a small fee of £2.50.

Workshops

Join the Victoria Baths fanzine-making co-operative! 

A fanzine is a small, self-published book or magazine dedicated to a subject the people who are making it love. It is usually personal and handmade and contains a mixture of drawings, writing and things like collages and photos. We think Victoria Baths deserves its own fanzine but we need your help! We want visitors to the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention to help us make a fanzine all about this unique, beautiful building and show us what they like best about this fascinating place!

Join in the workshops in the former superintendent's flat to make either your own, individual Victoria Baths fanzine or add to a Bunting Book that will be displayed in Victoria Baths as one big fanzine for future visitors to see.

Visitors will be able to use:

Selected material from the Victoria Baths Archive 
Be inspired by pictures and memories of the building's past from the Victoria Baths Archive.

Lino cutting and relief printing 
Explore simple relief printing and create unique illustrations and repeatable patterns to adorn your own hand-made zine. Looking at the decorative interiors of Victoria Baths as inspiration, use traditional lino and easy quickprint foam to make unique tile-sized blocks to print wherever you want.

Button book binding 
Discover the stitches to bind and design your very own book using buttons, thread, soft papers and card. You can decorate your book with embroidered stitches inspired by the architecture of the Victoria Baths.

Children welcome.

Co-operative printing

2012 is the United Nations' first International Year of Co-operatives. Leeds-based Footprint Workers' Co-operative are bringing along a Risograph and will discuss how to prepare material for print on a Risograph — learn about page imposition, limits on paper size and margins, two colour work and picture quality for the Risograph digital duplicator with a quick guide to communicating with printers. Footprint will help you get the most of the risograph and make your zines and fliers look better.

Co-operative working and living is creative, empowering and potentially radically anti-capitalist.

Find out:

What are co-ops and why should you be in one? Including workers' co-ops, housing co-ops, community co-ops, collective power and common ownership.

'Alice in apps land: explore your smart phone and your environment', presented by Visual Think Map in collaboration with Shift Space.

During this workshop you will discover the local landscape through digital stories and learn more about apps and the functionality of how your phone can enliven the world around you. Through an interactive and engaging tour of the area near Victoria Baths you will discover and digitally collate, using your phone, a variety of people's memories and your own as we introduce you to new apps and narratives, including old photos and memorabilia of the area. We'll finish by making an interactive map where everyone can share what they've made and then print a map. DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR PHONE AND WE'LL SEE YOU THERE!

'Vapid in a Day' 

Feminist duo Vapid Kitten invite visitors to contribute creatively to a special edition of the fanzine Vapid Kitten (published both in print and for Kindle). They will be constructing issue 8, themed 'Collaboration', throughout the day at the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention, aiming to include a big mishmash of experiences, words, drawings, collage and poems.

Vapid Kitten will provide some arty equipment and suggestions to get you started and would like to get as many people involved as possible. At the end of the day everyone involved will get a free digital copy of the zine.

Shop

Fanzines from across the country will be available to browse and buy. Nottingham's Caribou, a zine shop in a vintage caravan, will be setting up shop outside the building.

Food

Norwich-based Deerly Beloved Bakery is proud to be celebrating its first birthday at the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention, returning with good food that is cruelty free including vegan cakes, whoopie pies, brownies and savoury pies and pizza slices. Deerly Beloved Bakery specialises in vegan cakes, pastries, biscuits, cupcakes, muffins, breads, salads, starters, mains and desserts. It does not use any animal products. All cakes and bakes are made by hand in small batches using real bourbon vanilla, unrefined non-bone char sugars and margarines free from hydrogenated fats. No artificial preservatives or flavourings are used.

Exhibition

Posters of Inspirational European Women: Taken from the zine 'Shape & Situate' 

Leeds-based fanzine-maker Melanie Maddison will display a series of posters of inspirational European women around the balcony of the female pool, from her zine entitled 'Shape & Situate'. The posters highlight the (often hidden) history and lives of radical, inspirational women and women's collectives from Europe, connecting us with the past, inspiring us in the present and visually bringing women’s social and political history to life and into view.

If you would be interested in volunteering to help out on the day, please email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com

Facebook event

Listen to the Shrieking Violet discussing the event on All FM's Under the Pavement radio show, accompanied by musical selections from some of the speakers, here:

UtP 26/4/12 Fanzine focus by Under The Pavement on Mixcloud

See more photos from last year's event here, here and here. Poster by Kate Prior.

Future Everything events elsewhere in the building: Handmade will be a day of contemporary craft, digital hacking, interactivities and DIY culture, including a craft fair and a workshop by Manchester Craft and Design Centre. Find out what's on at http://futureeverything.org/art/whats-on-at-handmade.

Recreational science and Physical Oscillators: Interview with Antony Hall at Victoria Baths

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentlemen found a new hobby: recreational science. Vicars built their own microscopes. Would-be astronomers went out into their gardens and gazed up at the stars. One man kept a diary in which he wrote detailed observations about the decay of a nut whilst another, a collector, fashioned a bespoke moss jacket lined with pockets for his specimens.

Artist Antony Hall is a like recreational scientist for the twenty first century, inspired by these gentlemen of a certain age and their ability to find “interest in obscure things that weren't immediately exciting” whilst exploring new opportunities such as biohacking and nanotechnology. Often working with slides and Hele-shaw cells, he's interested in “how many different experiments you can do in a slide”.

He explains: “I always wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid – I had a sign on my bedroom saying 'lab', and I loved my microscope, but I wasn't very good at school so was encouraged not to do science. I did art instead and turned it into my science practice.

“I started doing animal sculpture. Then I looked at the natural world and how things are formed and how animals and insects behave. This got me interested in biology and ecology and the conceptual art of the 1970s.”

Antony often works with living creatures such as fish and insects. Pond Life, for example, magnified and projected microorganisms. “I like the element of collaboration with other creatures – of caring and nurturing them and getting them to behave in a certain way by providing them with things that are suitable such as food and light.”

He is a founding member of the Manchester-based Owl Project, a collective that looks at how humans interact with technology, and hacks old technology and turns it into something new, often through sound performances. Part of his practice also involves interactive workshops under the name of Tabletop Experiments. Antony explained: “I've always liked my work to be quite fun, and it makes science accessible.” Sometimes this involves showing participants how to make creations, for example 'brush-bots' – robots made from batteries, brushes and motors which draw spirographs and patterns. He describes them as: “Little units that interact. They've all got their own characters – it's as if they're alive but they're not. They dance around and back into each other. Some go round in circles and others go in straight lines.”

During Future Everything festival, Antony will be creating a “generative soundpiece” in the empty, disused gala pool in Victoria Baths, which members of the public will “walk in and compose”, experiencing invisible fields around motors via electromagnetic sensors akin to microphones that they will be encouraged to pick up and move around the space. Antony's challenge was: “How can I represent movement and liquid in this space that is now just air? How do I represent volume?” He decided the answer was to “energise objects in a big space” by suspending different motors above the pool and adding electricity: “The more energy you put in to it the more chaotic it becomes. The motors affect each other and associate themselves with each other in subtle interactions.”

He elaborated: “I wanted to represent the surface. Visitors will walk into the pool and, instead of walking under water, walk under a layer of activity. When you're beneath it you can hear it buzz above your head.” He admits: “I like going around my garden with a microphone recording the buzzing of bees.”

Inspiration for the installation was drawn from the natural world, in particular a type of beetle known as a whirligig that sits on the surface of the water and has split eyes so it can see above and below. Antony explains that: “Whirligig beetles swarm and “display” to each other. Sometimes they fight, and likewise it sounds really good when the motors clash.”

Antony's interest in capturing movement will be continued with a large wave pendulum made of jam jars hanging in the entrance to the cafe that visitors will set off with their movement as they enter and leave – simulating the continuous motion of a wave.

Antony Hall's Physical Oscillators can be experienced at Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 May from 10am-4pm during Future Everything festival. Free event.