ModernMythology Project
Visual Submission Package
ART AS A WAY
OF LISTENING
Modern Mythology Project brings installation, field research and learning environments into conversation with natural media, cultural meaning and shared futures.
Inheritance
A living installation of memory, material and generational resonance.
Our story, carried across generations.
Inheritance is a visual story told through installation, metaphor and resonance. It brings archives into a living environment of sound, water, stone, soil and growth to explore Britain's child migration and labour schemes and their reverberations across generations.
Aaron Mitchell is one of their descendants. His grandfather's history is a departure point into a shared story of children, families and the generations that followed. The project invites everyone to learn, understand and discover connections to their own family histories. Each family retains its own voice within the collective work.
One signal. Changing forms.
A recurring sound is proposed to pass through successive pools and material stations. The signal continues, while each setting changes its expression. Visitors follow a river-like sequence beneath a branching tree, encountering individual lives, records and living matter.
- Water carries. Linked pools make continuity and change visible.
- The tree unfolds. Roots, trunk and branches express a life becoming many lives.
- The archive anchors. Photographs and records keep individual people present.
- Living matter changes. Seeds, soil and moss introduce growth and time.
A reading station invites visitors and descendants to reflect, contribute knowledge and begin discovering stories still unknown or unspoken.
The OCAD University installation develops this material language through sound, soil, stone and living growth, connecting loss of language and emigration with visible change over time. Explore the installation and six-month model simulation ↓
AARON MITCHELL / ARTIST, CREATOR & DESCENDANT
Articulating the vision.
Mitchell composes the relationships between archive, metaphor, sound, pools, tree and light. Working with curatorial and technical collaborators, he creates conditions in which visitors can encounter individual lives and the systems that shaped them.
Seeking museum and gallery partners for development, prototyping and exhibition.
Four-page promotional proposal · PDF · 7.7 MB
Concept images depict a proposed installation. Objects, railway elements and archival displays are illustrative; final exhibition material will be verified and credited. Resonance expresses generational inheritance as an artistic metaphor. Water patterns and living-material responses require prototyping.
Project
Overview
Soil, moss, water, air and fire become living environments for perception, resonance and learning. Observe, record, translate, install, reflect.
Selected Works & Project Record
Installations, objects and research in practice: Now and Then, Hjól and Principally Uncertain, with a concise project timeline.
Artist Profile & Possibilities
Aaron Mitchell's interdisciplinary practice connects installation, media ecology, arts-based research and public learning across Canada and Iceland.
Working Installations
Places, people and materials carry the project forward. This record brings installed work and active field research into view.
The Canadian practice moves among galleries, public sites and learning environments. Photographs below are identified by what they visibly document; exact venue and date are added when supported by the record.
Toronto / 2011
Marshalling McLuhan · Gladstone Hotel
A performance and installation developed in collaboration with Lillian Allen during the DEW Line / McLuhan100 program.
Toronto / 2021–22
OCAD University · fieldwork
Site and classroom work with writing, image, materials and collective observation.
Toronto / 2022
Allan Gardens · site work
Natural materials and place-based inquiry at the Conservatory; documented through field research and material studies.
Hamilton / 2022
Principally Uncertain
An installation and photographic work on light, probability and interpretation. The work joins photographic images and spatial interpretation.
INSTALLATION / FIELD / MATERIAL
SELECT AN IMAGE TO ENLARGE
A living material record
Modern Mythology Project
Scripted Emotions: A Visual Ode to Language
OCAD University · June 2024
Language, migration and changing environments
This installation tells a story of loss of language and emigration: what is carried, what is left behind, and what changes when a life enters a different environment. Books and printed records sit within a field of stone, soil, sand, salt, water and living growth. Their shifting relationships make the passage of time and space visible. Whatever our story, wherever we come from, our surroundings leave their marks on us.
Sound, material and time
A central spring extends into stone-and-soil arms, pathways and satellite stations. Beneath the rocks, a soil bed holds small mosses and clover seeds. Each arm receives a different sonic frequency, creating distinct conditions for exploring how vibration and environment may affect the materials over time. Sand is conceived as an active, animated medium; patterns in sand, salt, soil and vegetation form the changing material field of the work.
The process is to apply sound, observe, photograph and compare: follow grain movement, surface patterns, salt crystallisation, moisture, germination, growth and decay. Records of each arm’s frequency and exposure, alongside water, light and other environmental conditions, help distinguish observed changes from proposed effects of resonance. Immediate movement and slower material transformations belong to the same time-based work.
Four Laws of Media, applied to natural materials
McLuhan’s Four Laws guide the inquiry: what does a material under these conditions enhance; what does it displace or render obsolete; what does it retrieve; and what might it reverse into when pushed further? These questions organise observation and interpretation as the material and its environment change together.
From this installation to Inheritance
Inheritance carries these questions into family history and the reverberations of child migration across generations. Aaron Mitchell’s grandfather’s story provides a personal point of departure, while the installation opens onto a shared condition: people, languages and materials are changed by the places they pass through. Patterns persist, shift and become visible over time; each life retains its own story within that wider field.
Explore Inheritance: memory, migration and generational resonance ↑
A model simulation of growth over time, creating material change. Lichen, moss and slime mould develop across soil, stone, book edges and damp contact points.
Six months of material change
A model simulation of growth and material change over six one-month intervals. The sequence imagines evolving patterns in sand, salt and soil alongside moss, clover, lichen and small slime-mould accents. It visualises the installation’s proposed process; the images are not a record of measured monthly outcomes.
MMP Field / Installation companion
Begin with a material.
Take the installation's questions into the field. Enter a medium to examine its four laws; keep observations, photographs and research notes together. The Responsible AI Reading Station offers a grounded prompt and a place to record sources, uncertainty and correction.
Test a material in MMP Field ↗
Exploratory prototype: rule-based hypotheses, not scientific certainty. A ChatGPT sign-in and internet connection are required to save your private records and images. The growth study above is imagined; field observations record what you actually find.
OBSERVE · TEST RECORD · REVISE
The Laws of Media Field Journal is a companion for fieldwork. Enter a medium to examine its four laws; keep observations, photographs and research notes together. The Responsible AI Reading Station offers a grounded prompt and a place to record sources, uncertainty and correction.
Open and install the Field Journal ↗
Install from your browser for use on a device. A ChatGPT sign-in and connection are required to save private entries and images.
CYMATICS LAB PUBLIC BETA
Explore how frequency changes form. Adjust the drive, compare a pinned reference, and move between sand and water views in the MMP Cymatics Lab.
Sand and water use simplified models of specified apparatus; patterns depend on geometry and conditions as well as frequency. Moss, soil and salt use clearly labeled theoretical, artistic interference views, not physical predictions.
Public beta · Open to everyone. [Share feedback] as you explore the models and compare patterns.
Art in dialogue with diverse communities.
For exhibition, education and site-responsive collaboration.
Download the complete book (108 pages) ↗
Download the visual booklet (four pages) ↗
Begin a conversation ↗
MODERN MYTHOLOGY PROJECT
ART AS A WAY OF LISTENING
Inheritance: Tell Your Own Story
A six-week Modern Mythology Project course with Aaron Mitchell.
Explore your own story through family history, images, objects, visual symbolism and art making. Develop a visual story that connects personal experience with the histories you inherit.
Proposed course fee: CAD $300 per participant for six weeks.
Register your interest to receive dates, location or format, and enrolment details when confirmed. No payment is required to express interest.
Please include your name and preferred contact information.