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, Anno draws on the actual datasets arising from the mapping and insurance records of the shipwreck to invent fictitious voices and scripts that reimagine scenarios and characters set in a universe of the wreck, the AI-produced voices layering together in ways that resist conventional narrative or documentary approaches, creating something deliberately stranger and more speculative.
During her five-day residency, Anno will install the new work and present it to its first test audience on the evening of Wednesday 4 March. Visitor feedback and practical insights gathered through the installation and the public performance, taking place from 6.15 - 7.30pm and followed by an Artist Talk and Q&A, will be crucial in shaping the work toward a future exhibition. Tickets and further information can be found here.
The project is supported by a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England.
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.”
