Avatar artist and curator LaTurbo Avedon presents the first in a series of online commissions for Manchester International Festival's Virtual Factory, inspired by the landmark cultural space being built and the festival's future home.

Taking place in a virtual rethinking of the Factory, Your Progress Will Be Saved has been built on an island within the global gaming platform Fortnite Creative. Designed in the real world by international architectural practice Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, under the direction of OMA partner Ellen van Loon, it is believed to be the first major cultural building to be recreated in Fortnite, and the first to be launched in virtual space before it opens in the physical world.

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 adventure in an adapted journey on the Virtual Factory website and taking tours of LaTurbo’s intervention on Twitch. 

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.

MIF began developing Virtual Factory in 2019, as part of its pre-Factory programme on the journey towards The Factory, where artists will be encouraged to create radical and interdisciplinary work that maximises the boundless potential of the highly flexible spaces within the building and the expanding digital spaces beyond its structure.