The newly renamed Northwest Vision + Media has announced the follow-up to its entertaining Digital Futures conferences and seminars, which took place earlier in the year.

Its Digital Academies will comprise two three-day residential courses at Manchester’s City Inn in July. Here’s how they’ll work:

We will support a handful of creatives and entrepreneurs to work in partnership with the region’s top production houses on real projects adapting innovative content for new formats, applications and platforms.

Successful candidates will receive professional industry advice and coaching in the application of creative thinking, idea development, pitching and selling. They must have bold ideas and new approaches to creative content.

The production houses in question are Multi Media Arts, Hat Trick North, Channel M, Centini and All Out Productions. Between them their briefs, available on the Digital Futures website, cover online, mobile, radio and – primarily – television platforms.

Thirty successful candidates will be selected for the academies – five of whom may be invited to continue their work with paid placements. Proposals should be submitted by July 4.

This one pretty much speaks for itself:

Naked Bike Ride 2007 Manchester

June 8 at 7pm we will be riding naked to protest oil dependency.

We will meet at 6pm at The basement, 24 Lever street, then ride naked through the streets of manchester.

Hope to see you Bare!

Meg Fenwick
Manchester Naked Bike Ride Coordinator

Full details available on World Naked Bike Ride’s Manchester wiki entry. You can also watch a documentary about the event on YouTube and see a few photos of what to expect on June 8 [not quite safe for work].

It was inevitable really. Set up an exclusive, expensive festival for the arts and a low-budget alternative will soon follow. I suggested as much back in November, and Gareth McCann has since come up with the ingeniously simple name: Not Manchester International Festival:

If every event that happens in Manchester from 29 June to 15 July carries our web address on all its promo material then everyone who’s looking will know where to go to find out everything else that’s happening. And what’s more, everyone who’s putting something on will be promoting not just themselves but everyone else who’s putting something on. So it’s not just great publicity but good karma too.

Gareth was motivated to set this fringe of sorts up after a play he’d written, Lovers Talk, wasn’t commissioned by MIF, meaning no publicity boost for its premiere (Britons Protection, 29 June).

Other promoters have already signed up – including the likes of I’m so Indie (my band wouldn’t play Manchester International Festival even if they asked, which they haven’t) at Dry Bar and the Castle pub on Oldham Street, which will host 20 bands in two days.

Not Manchester International Festival has received coverage on Manchester Confidential and Gareth has started a blog and set up a Myspace too. Good luck to him.

To be honest, it’s not very often that I give much consideration to writing about gardening – grass is for sitting or running around on, and flowers just make me sneeze – but this one’s a little different:

A nightime, participative, artist-led expedition where a decrepit urban area is subversively rejuvenated through community gardening. In association with the National Wildflower Centre, this event is led by artist Jason Minsky and will transform the way in which participants think about who owns public space.

Guerrrilla gardening begins at 6pm next Thursday, 3 May, in Urbis. It’s then open daily, Monday to Sunday, 10am until 6pm.

I haven’t got a clue what it’s about, but you can read the Wiki or visit sites like GuerrilaGardening.org and Primal Seeds for more information.

[Hat-tip to TheArtGuide]