dutch artist theo jansen makes some really fascinating work. begining with a functional ufo that he flew over the dutch town of delft in the 80’s he’s moved on to what he calls strandbeesten, translated as beach animals. they are pretty amazing. modled in the computer and adhering to an evolutionary design principle (namely whatever works is reproduced in the next generation) these large scale sculptures utilize wind power to “roam” the beaches. you have to watch the video’s to get a sense of them. not much out there to be read about him (in english at least), but i did find this one bit of artspeak on the subject. thanks to rich for the link.

Mr Nonist ............Amazing stuff. It’s only a question so please don’t yell at me….... are all the images of Theo’s Super sand crawlers actual sculptures or are some concept models, perhaps we can e-mail this cat to see if he speaks english.  Pretty Wild Work -

unfortunately a lot of the stuff in the images section are in fact computer concept models. until you watch the videos you can’t really get a sense of these things. the image i linked to in the thumbnail is, in fact, a working model. but seeing it standing still, with no context for scale, really does not do the work justice. i for one had to download “mplayer” in order to actually see the video footage. a bit of a hassle, but worth it i think.

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