Virtual Factory launches with LaTurbo Avedon in Fortnite Creative
Virtual Factory launches with LaTurbo Avedon in Fortnite Creative
We’re excited to announce Virtual Factory, a new digital series featuring commissions by leading international artists, inspired by our future home The Factory.
Artists across different mediums will 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.
The first in this series is LaTurbo Avedon’s digital intervention Your Progress Will Be Saved taking place in a reimagining of The Factory, built on an island in Fortnite Creative.
LaTurbo’s work plays with and deconstructs ideas about identity, authorship and the conventions of artistic practice. Your Progress Will Be Saved takes 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.
As much of the world grapples with a cultural moment of immateriality, Your Progress Will Be Saved shines back the close-yet-far tension of being alone online, together. LaTurbo Avedon
You can play in Fortnite, choose your own adventure in an adapted journey on the Virtual Factory website and be taken on a tour by LaTurbo on Twitch.
Over the course of a year we’ll be working with artists including 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.
These artists through their distinct practices construct worlds through computer games, cinematic tools and augmented reality. They are creating work for a building that hasn’t opened yet - alluding to the reconfigurable shape of things to come and sending out a message that The Factory will be open for everyone to re-interpret and re-use. Gabrielle Jenks, Digital Director at MIF
Virtual Factory builds on the ambitious experimental work that we’ve commissioned during the Festival, including Björk’s Biophilia app, Ed Atkins’ Performance Capture, Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s To the Moon and our Creative Lab programme developing digital skills and practice with local creatives – Virtual Factory underlines the digital ambition that is a cornerstone of the real-world Factory.