Making Space
The Seven Stones Research Project | Anno Mitchell
Using generative AI, Anno Mitchell is creating an immersive ‘voice’ work that uses the 1967 Torrey Canyon shipwreck as an imaginative starting point. When the oil tanker ran aground off Cornwall’s coast in March 1967, its cargo of 118,285 tons of crude oil caused an unprecedented environmental catastrophe - the largest vessel ever wrecked at that time.
For The Seven Stones Research Project, the artist draws on datasets derived from shipwreck mapping, maritime archives and insurance records to construct speculative scripts and fictional voices that inhabit an imagined universe of the wreck. These AI-generated voices overlap and fragment across multiple speakers, resisting conventional narrative or documentary approaches and instead creating a deliberately strange and immersive listening environment.
The project builds from the artist’s wider body of work exploring shipwrecks as accumulative events that connect global histories of trade, navigation, extraction and environmental transformation.
For her residency, the artist will install and test the work using a distributed audio system that allows sound fragments to move across space in shifting patterns. Voices may emerge individually, collectively or in layered formations, echoing navigational systems, weather movements and oceanic drift.
On Wednesday 4 March, Anno will be testing the piece for the first time with a public audience. Visitor feedback and practical insights from the installation will be crucial to developing the work toward a future exhibition.
Events:
Public Viewing - Wednesday 4 March 2026, 4 - 6pm
The work-in-progress installation will be open to visitors. Free entry – no booking required
Artist Talk + Q&A - Wednesday 4 March 2026, 6.15 - 7.30pm
Capacity is limited – booking required – link to event details and tickets here
The project is supported by a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England.
Additional technical and installation support is by Jon Cooper.
About The Artist
Anno Mitchell is an artist working across sound, installation, and computational systems. Her practice explores deep time, maritime history, and technological memory through speculative and archival methods. Using AI-generated voice, algorithmic systems, and custom-built hardware, she creates immersive works that operate between documentary, fiction, and ritual. Her work investigates how technology can expose the strangeness of human attempts to record and narrate the world.
Artist Residencies
The Making Space residency at Fabrica offers artists four days in the gallery to develop, test, or present new work to a focused audience. Beyond the space itself, the residency includes curatorial, audience development, and marketing support, with planning and dialogue often beginning months in advance. These ongoing conversations with Fabrica’s team help shape the artist’s presentation, audience engagement, and the overall experience of the work in the gallery context.
“The Seven Stones Research Project arose out of an interest in shipwrecks as a kind of fossil - a transitional piece of technological complexity," says Mitchell. "Shipwrecks are both data points and fictions, resonant stories and mapping entities. I am interested in how the emerging field of generative media might weave this idea of data points and fictions together to create completely new experiences for visitors.”
