Since 1990, Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been engineering what he calls a “new form of life” — a growing family of skeletal creatures built almost entirely from ordinary yellow PVC electrical conduit, designed to walk the flat, hard-packed beaches of the Netherlands using nothing but wind for power. He calls the project Strandbeest, Dutch for “beach animal,” and he talks about it the way a biologist talks about a species: each design is a “genome,” each generation is meant to survive its environment a little better than the last, and the ones that fail — that snap a leg or can’t right themselves against a gust — are, in his words, made extinct.
“Animaris Geneticus Ondularis” is the latest miniature Strandbeest kinetic sculpture by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. The 122-piece sculpture has 20 legs that move in a mesmerizing wave sequence. “Animaris Geneticus Ondularis” is produced by on-demand 3D printing service Shapeways. We previously posted about Jansen’s wonderful giant-sized Strandbeests, wind-powered autonomous machines that roam the beaches of the Netherlands.
What makes this desktop-scale piece so satisfying is that it’s not a scale model in the ordinary sense — it’s a real member of the Strandbeest lineage, just miniaturized and produced through 3D printing rather than hand-cut tubing. Some of Jansen’s full-size Strandbeests stretch many meters from nose to tail, walking the tideline at Scheveningen and Ijmuiden on air captured and stored in repurposed plastic bottles that act as an artificial “stomach,” releasing pressure to drive their legs when the wind itself falls still. Shrinking that same mechanical logic down to something that fits on a shelf doesn’t just make the work more collectible — it makes the underlying engineering easier to actually see. The leg mechanism at the heart of every Strandbeest, now studied by engineers worldwide as “Jansen’s linkage,” was arrived at only after Jansen ran thousands of generations of a genetic algorithm on his computer, evolving leg proportions the way nature evolves a joint, long before he ever cut a length of tubing. That’s the quiet joke underneath a project people often mistake for whimsy: Strandbeest sits as much in the lineage of evolutionary science as it does in kinetic art.
It’s also, unmistakably, product design — the same restraint and material honesty that runs through the best of the field, just aimed at something that walks rather than sits on a table. Jansen has said he considers himself an engineer as much as an artist, and pieces like “Animaris Geneticus Ondularis” make that dual identity legible at a glance: modular joints, repeated parts, a structure with no ornament beyond what the mechanism itself requires. Anyone curious about how far that kind of thinking has traveled since Jansen started building with lengths of PVC tubing in 1990 can browse more of the world’s most inventive object-makers in our Reference Library, or dig further into Design more broadly.
Photo and video by Theo Jansen.
2 Comments
I’ve been a big fan of strandbeests for a while. It’s amazing that they can be 3D printed now. I just saw a mini strandbeest on QI with Stephen Fry too!
Reblogged this on design4youandme and commented:
Really amazing video