Like me, you’ve probably been hearing a lot recently a lot about Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests – kinetic sculptures that are also walking machines, though both those terms feel somehow reductive.
Here’s Lawrence Weschler in the New York Times magazine:
“Jansen began trying to model the mystery of walking by deploying stick figures … ‘In its essence,’ he said, ‘'walking is simply constantly changing your shape in such a way that you move forward. But how exactly does it work?
“In the midst of these cogitations, as Jansen himself was walking along the Scheveningen shore one day, the thought entered his head that maybe he ‘should pay a visit to the Gamma hardware store and check out their plastic tubing.’”
The rest is a kind of history, involving much trial and error, and an awful lot of mathematics and eventually he made these fabulous creatures and made them walk so that look partly like insects, partly like a synchronized if slightly ramshackle chorus line. Nothing ramshackle about the Tiller Girls below:
The great thing is, the Strandbeests don’t actually look like machines, much less robots. They look - that dubious word – organic, and they certainly have a life of their own, at least when the wind blows. Jansens actually says. “they walk on the wind.”
That phrase of Weschler’s “In the middle of these cogitations” is an echo, deliberate I don’t doubt, of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe has found the footprint on the beach – a sign of something, though inevitably not of walking, and having run through various unconvincing attempts to explain it to himself, he says, “In the middle of these cogitations, apprehensions, and reflections, it came into my thoughts one day that all this might be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat.” He’s wrong about that of course. And I find it interesting that Weschler uses the fancier “midst” while Defoe was happy with “middle.”
There are a lot of still photographs of the Strandbeests around, and there’s even a book with images by Lena Herzog, spouse of Werner, but the stills really don’t convey the strangeness or the wonder of Jansen’s creations.
Click on the link below to the Strandbeest site and see them for yourself:
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