Wild Things Are on the Beach
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| Theo Jansen wants to make "life" and he figures the best way to do it is to start from scratch. A scientist-turned-artist, Jansen's bizarre beach animals have their roots in a computer program that he designed 17 years ago in which virtual four-legged creatures raced against each other to identify survivors fit enough to reproduce.
With plastic tubes costing about 10 cents a meter and with cable ties, nylon strings and adhesive tape doing the rest, these lightweight, insect-like beasts are pretty inexpensive to create. Designed to live on the beach and race on wet sand, their evolution hasn't been easy. While Jansen initially used a computer program to figure out the most effective design to get the feet walking, all of his subsequent creations have been entirely free-form, constructed solely through trial and error. Each animal is made up of 375 replaceable tubes whose respective lengths represent the beast's very own unique "genetic code" influencing its quality and its walking pattern. Many of the initial species failed to stand or died out over time, and later models tackled different problems. The Animaris Arena rolled out a trunk that had a hammer that drove a pin into the ground to prevent itself from being blown away in a storm, and the Animaris Sabulosa tried to push down its nose in the same situation. Amazing that all of his creatures are powered solely by the wind, yet can remain so dimensionally large. Read more from Wired News BMW - Defining innovation - commercial YouTube |
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