Anno Mitchell

This project investigates how AI systems can construct a performative archive rather than a static record. One that speaks, drifts, accumulates, and forgets. Beginning with the 1967 wreck of the Torrey Canyon, the work has expanded into a multi-layered exploration of maritime disaster, oil infrastructure, geological time, and submerged landscape.

Rather than reconstructing historical events, the project builds generative systems in which archival fragments, speculative narratives, and data-driven materials are continuously produced and distributed. The archive behaves less like a catalogue and more like an ecology — fragments surfacing, overlapping, receding.

The first fully public presentation of the work took place at Laundrette, Bristol, in January 2026. The installation derived from thousands of recorded shipwreck coordinates. Each wreck location was translated into a short audio fragment, spoken in a neutral archival tone, and positioned spatially according to its bearing from the installation site.

The system functioned like sonar. From a central listening point, the archive swept clockwise around the room. Shipwrecks emerged as intermittent signals in geographic relation to the space. Over time, repetition and accumulation transformed administrative language into something incantatory and atmospheric.

Holding Space, Bristol, 2026
Holding Space, Bristol, 2026

All the Wrecks in the World — Bristol installation documentation, 2026

The broader installation system incorporates multiple simultaneous audio streams distributed across a grid of speakers. Four types of material operate concurrently: archival data streams structured from cleaned datasets; speculative narrative fragments reconstructing plausible transmissions; character-based voices; autonomous narrative entities derived from the archive; and durational oceanic material referencing geological deep time.

The result is not a singular storyline but a layered environment in which listeners assemble meaning through movement and duration.

Making Space at Fabrica, Brighton, 2026

Seven Stones Research, Making Space Residency at Fabrica, 2026
Seven Stones Research, Making Space Residency at Fabrica, 2026
Making Space Residency at Fabrica, 2026
Making Space Residency at Fabrica, 2026

Making Space Residency at Fabrica, Brighton, 2026