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Wild Things Are on the Beach

By Lakshmi Sandhana | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2

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02:00 AM Jan. 24, 2005 PT

Theo Jansen wants to make "life" and he figures the best

way to do it is to start from scratch.

A self-styled god, Jansen is evolving an entirely new line

of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed

to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind.

Over the years, successive generations of his creatures

have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk

by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning

obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering

themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm.


Click thumbnails for full-size image:
The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is meant for crossing

the tundra. Due to the fact that one must wait until

strong winds come from the right direction to push the

structure, living quarters must be made in the animal to

make travel agreeable.Dutch artist Theo Jansen stands

alongside the Animaris Rhinoceros Transport. A direct

descendant of the Animari, or Beach Animals, the structure

is equipped with passenger seating and can be used for

transportation.Even though it weighs around two tons, the

Animaris Rhinoceros can be set into motion by just one

person dragging it along.The Animaris Sabulosa has a more

secure method to prevent it from being blown away: a

spoiler on the front that pushes the nose down into the

sand when a storm approaches.



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. Determined to translate the evolutionary

process off-screen, Jansen went to a local shop and found

his own alternative to the biological cell -- the humble

plastic tube.

"Animals are machines as well," said Jansen. "I was making

animals with just the tubes because they were cheap but

later on they turned out to be very helpful in making

artificial life because they are very flexible and

multifunctional as well. I see it now as a sort of protein

-- in nature, everything is almost made of protein and you

have various uses of protein; you can make nails, hair,

skin and bones. There's a lot of variety in what you can

do with just one material and this is what I try to do as

well."

Video
click to see video
Watch Theo Jansen's beach animals in action:
• Animaris Percipiere
• Animaris Rhinoceros Transport
(requires Windows Media Player)
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.

"I've seen a lot of mechanical sculpture, and Jansen's

animari are the finest I've seen by far in the 'low-tech

clockwork' mechanism category," said Carl Pisaturo, a

robotic designer. "By clockwork, I mean mechanisms that

have intrinsic, not universally controllable actions, and

by low-tech I mean parts more 'crafted' than machined, and

the lack of electronic or electrical systems. These are

amazing creations and the simplicity of the technology and

the fact that they are wind-powered only makes their

poetic motions more impressive."

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

Currently, Jansen is working on giving the seventh

generation of these creatures, comprising a herd of seven

animals, the ability to move even in the wind's absence.

His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their

body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped,

enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes

afterward. Eventually, he plans to increase the efficiency

so that they can go on for days or even years.

"They have a food source in the wind so they can store

energy and use it later on," said Jansen. "The downside is

that they might have to wait for days, for the wind hopper

to move on and on and then be able to move for maybe five

minutes. They are just like snakes. Snakes also lie in the

sun for days digesting their food. On the beach the

animals have to catch the wind and wait for a long time

before they have enough wind in their stomach to go for a

walk."
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Click thumbnails for full-size image:
The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is meant for crossing

the tundra. Due to the fact that one must wait until

strong winds come from the right direction to push the

structure, living quarters must be made in the animal to

make travel agreeable.Dutch artist Theo Jansen stands

alongside the Animaris Rhinoceros Transport. A direct

descendant of the Animari, or Beach Animals, the structure

is equipped with passenger seating and can be used for

transportation.Even though it weighs around two tons, the

Animaris Rhinoceros can be set into motion by just one

person dragging it along.The Animaris Sabulosa has a more

secure method to prevent it from being blown away: a

spoiler on the front that pushes the nose down into the

sand when a storm approaches.



A couple of years ago, Jansen created the Animaris

Rhinoceros Transport, a two-ton walking monster also

powered by wind energy, which could be set into motion by

just one person dragging it along. Having a cockpit and

enough room for several people to comfortably sit inside,

the rhinoceros represented Jansen's effort to create a

machine version of the beach animal used solely for

transport akin to the way cars stand for mechanical

versions of horses. He says a future version -- a 12-ton

behemoth, big enough to have several rooms inside -- could

be called the Animaris Mammoth.

"I think they are absolutely beautiful," said Bruce

Shapiro, robotic artist. "He has figured out a way to use

inexpensive materials to construct wind-powered walking

machines. What makes them so compelling is the wave of

actuators, like the motion of a centipede's legs. I

suspect that, as humans, we recognize this action as

specific to living things, hence our fascination with

Jansen's 'organisms.'"

By using the pneumatic system as a foundation, Jansen

hopes to eventually provide his beasts with nerves,

muscles, advanced sensing capabilities and even

rudimentary decision makers that mimic the function of the

brain, before permanently releasing herds of them out onto

the beach. Right now, he allows the animals to race each

other and manually replaces the genetic code (tube

lengths) of the winner into the rest of the losers.

Ultimately, he envisions his animals possessing "life" in

a sense, evolving on their own without his intervention.

"I imagine that two animals will meet each other and

compare their qualities in some way; have a demonstration

somewhere on how they run and how fast they can run and

also do some quality comparison on how they survive the

winds. And the one with the better quality kills the other

one and gives the other its own genetic code. There could

be 30 animals on the beach, running around all the time,

copying genetic codes. And then it would go on without me

."

"I try to remake nature with the idea that while doing

this you will uncover the secrets of life and that you

will meet the same problems as the real creator," he

added.

However, creating autonomous, roaming herds won't be that

easy.

"Making the next jump toward 'living thing' involves

turning, avoiding obstacles, power and computation issues,

as well as the need for durability -- a black hole of

technical work," said Pisaturo. "But insofar as art being

about truth, such difficulties -- say, a tipped-over,

short-circuited machine half-buried in beach sand -- would

speak eloquently of how hard it is to be god