A feeling of progress

When I was a young sculptor, I pressed sand in to buckets to make castles on the beach. I dug, with grit under my nails and salt in my hair.

My heart sank the other day when my four year old texted me an AI-generated image of herself, asking whether I liked what she had drawn. I stopped myself from replying with “thanks, I hate it,” which sat in high contention with telling her it was beautiful. Her childhood is different to mine because she is growing up in a different time. Some things remain the same for now though, like building sandcastles. 

Sandcastle building seems like an absurd thing to automate. Why would I want to do that? I guess I could ask my daughter the same thing. Why didn’t she get out the crayons? It’s a question of progress and the norms formed and upheld by technical systems. My practice questions norms through creating new non-normative technologies, so an automated sandcastle building robot was an alluring endeavour.

A feeling of progress (2025) is tasked with perpetually building and destroying a sandcastle. This sculpture embodies cyclical making and unmaking, leaning into the Sisyphean experience of being human, staged in mechanical perpetuity.