'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Nativity - sand sculpture

I know Christmas is long over but I have a nativity sand sculpture for you today as it was next on my list to document. This was made in December 2017 in La Pineda, Catalonia. Each year we made a nativity on the beach and every time we chose a different theme. This helped make it interesting for ourselves and our audience. There are many nativities around the Mediterranean but they are all quite traditional. Ours always got people scratching their heads in wonder.

Manuel Labour

This year the theme was Robots and I arrived a few days ahead of the other sculptors to get the sand piles ready. I worked with the local council workers from the city hall and because we had all been doing it for several years it came together like clockwork.

These guys are great and work fast, with minimal discussion. I thank the language barrier for that. It was a few long days of getting all the sand in place but we made good progress between all the siestas and flutting around waiting for materials to arrive. We only had one form to finish when the other sculptors arrived.

The nuclear family

It was decided that I would make the crib itself, which had the three main characters. I did have some ideas in mind but I mostly winged it. I had recently watched Adam Curtis' documentary 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' and the title had stuck with me as had the documentary.

The lines are beginning to blur between people and machines. This last decade I have seen technological advances in both hardware and software that are truly the thing of science fiction. Someone said something about the fact you can tell an advanced technology by the fact it seems like magic and that is the state we are in. I have always prided myself in understanding how things work but now things have gotten away from me and no matter how much I try to understand AI or Quantum computers, I am left dumb. But here we are. Now our choice is do we trust these new technologies or do we treat them with suspicion? I don't know the answer to this. But one thing I do know is that it is hard to not be part of the system as they integrate further and further into our lives. But it's not all about computers. Take woodworking. What was once all hand-powered tools has now been replaced with amazingly efficient motor tools. I can't remember the last time I drove a screw in by hand.

With this sculpture, I wanted to be positive and think about the fact that even though they are scary with their hard surfaces a strength they can be soft and caring and open new horizons of possibilities. This Video from Bjork was also an inspiration.

Missing data

I will say at this point that I have lost my SLR beauty shots of the sculpture and all I could cobble together for this post are ones I took with my mobile phone. If you Have been around Hive for 7 years I used some of them in my daily progress updates when I was making the sculpture. Does anyone remember Steepshot?

Most of them are from its unfinished state. So you will have to forgive me but it gives you an opportunity to see how I block out and work the sand as I search to uncover the sculpture.

As with all sand sculptures I finished from the top as I worked down. Once I was happy with the heads the bodies and all the other appendages started fighting for their rightful place.

I was happy with it in the end. Not scary at all. Mary and Joseph were stoic. I left Jesus as a human baby thinking the contrast added to the story.

I hope the final photos show up someday on one of my many hard drives. It is one of the problems as we start to rely more and more on machines and computers. Things can so easily be deleted.

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

Snow White - Snow/ ice sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite

I am also starting to create NFTs of my sculptures and welcome you to my gallery where you can own a bit of ephemeral sculpture history.