I was commissioned by Manchester International Festival (MIF) in 2017, as part of the Creative 50, to create responses to the festival content.

A the final act of MIF2017, Turner Prize-nominated artist Phil Collins returned Friedrich Engels to the city where he made his name – in the form of a Soviet-era statue. The statue was erected outside HOME in the centre of Manchester.

As a response to this Ceremony, I developed Propaganda-iser. A Twitter-bot was developed. Festival attendees were asked to tweet photos of themselves using the hashtage #propaganda_me. The bot would take the attached image and produce a Soviet era-style image with the subject photo alongside a Manchester theme.

The project was originally intended as an installation – an interactive piece that would sit near the Ceremony. People would walk past a camera and find themselves part of a projected Propaganda piece. Logisitics and timescale necessitated a move to an online experience.

Some of the @Propagandaiser output: https://twitter.com/propagandaiser