Playing God
Working from his studio on an isolated, grassy embankment between a highway and a canal just outside Delft, Jansen is a cross between a beneficent uncle and H.G Wells’ fictional Dr Moreau when speaking about his creations, often using the language of Darwinian natural selection when explaining the evolution of his project.
Built from yellow plastic tubing, the kind usually used to insulate electrical wiring, and nylon string, Jansen’s creatures are a complex design of rods and strings. There’s something primal the way they look, like the skeletons of large altered beasts, but when in motion take on a living quality that is both amazing and amusing.
It’s taken a long time to get where he is today. In the early days, his challenge was working out the algorithm that would make the animals first stand and then walk. Creating a computer program on an old Atari, he finally struck upon the “11 holy numbers” that set the rules of the distances between the joints and tubes.
“Real animals have the same mechanical principals, which I think is why the Strandbeesten look like real animals.”
From Animaris Geneticus Ondula that resembles a skeletal high stepping chorus line, to the lumbering three-ton Animaris Rhinoceros Transport that can carry a passenger, the principles of movement and engineering are the same for each sculpture.
Jansen hopes that one day they will be highly evolved enough to live in herds on the beaches, able to fend for themselves without the need for human intervention.
By setting them in competition against each other he is able to test what features work best in the often inclement conditions. The animals that fall short, die, donating their DNA — the plastic tubing and nylon string — to create the next, stronger and smarter animal.
The latest family of animals have wings that feather in a wave motion. While making the sculptures even more intriguing there is a purpose for them; the wings help capture the wind in empty lemonade bottles — the animals’ “stomachs” — that can then be stored and released when there is no wind. They can’t move for long on this energy, but it is another step in their evolution.
Other sculptures have a water feeler, a tube that sucks in air, but when it feels the resistance of sucking in water from the sea it changes direction. The “brain” is a binary step counter, so the animal can tell where it is in relation to danger in the form of the sea and the sand dunes.
They still need a lot of help from Jansen to survive unaided, although the latest breed of Strandbeest can hammer a pin into the ground when the wind is too strong and it is in danger of being blown over.
Continue reading at CNN.