Virtual Factory: Your Progress Will Be Saved

About

Artist avatar LaTurbo Avedon has created Your Progress Will Be Saved for Virtual Factory, a series of online commissions by leading international artists, inspired by The Factory, the landmark cultural space being built in Manchester, UK, which will be Manchester International Festival's future home. LaTurbo’s digital intervention takes place in a reimagining of The Factory, which has been built on an island in the global gaming platform Fortnite Creative. LaTurbo’s work plays with and deconstructs our ideas about identity, authorship and the conventions of artistic practice. Much of Your Progress Will Be Saved deals with mirrors, taking visitors on a constantly evolving journey through shifting spaces, across illuminated dance floors and into private booths, experimenting with and blurring the distinctions between what we call the real and the virtual worlds.

Gamers and non-gamers will be able to experience Your Progress Will Be Saved, which is free to try by playing the full game in Fortnite Creative, choosing their own pathway in an adapted journey on the Virtual Factory website and taking tours of LaTurbo’s intervention on Twitch.

Virtual Factory underlines the digital ambition that is a cornerstone of the real-world Factory. With LaTurbo Avedon leading the charge, the artists commissioned for the Virtual Factory series, have built reputations through very different artistic practices and offer commentary on the political, social and philosophical issues of the day.

Each artist is being invited to respond to, reconfigure and play with the different elements of the building, including the architecture, the people and the history of the site. Through augmented reality, interactive and mobile gaming, film and social media, Virtual Factory aims to imagine and create work that harnesses these new creative landscapes as spaces of infinite possibility.

Your Progress Will Be Saved opens on Wednesday 1 July and runs until the autumn. Subsequent commissions will be released over the next year, including a new project by the British-Nigerian artist and director Jenn Nkiru, whose global reputation was cemented by her work on Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apeshit video; the New York City based game developer and professor of video games, Robert Yang, whose work often focuses on gay men, intimacy and queer spaces; and the British artist Tai Shani, whose work encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations and was one of the joint winners of the Turner Prize 2019.