Scheveningen. Kinetic art

Theo Jansen was born in 1948 in Netherlands, in a small coastal town next to The Hague and he trained as an engineer and scientist at the Delft University of Technology. In 1981 he developed a painting machine in the same city.

In 1986, after reading The Blind Watchmaker by British zoologist Richard Dawkins, he became fascinated by the theory of evolution and the natural selection of species.

In 1990 he decided to focus his work on creating artificial beings and applied his engineering knowledge to beach beasts.

In 2007, one of his creatures appeared in an advertising campaign, and Jansen's work gained international fame. Since then it has been exhibited in museums around the world.

For ten years Theo Jansen has been busy creating a new nature. Build large figures imitating skeletons of animals that are able to walk using the force of the wind from the Dutch beaches. His works are a fusion of art and engineering. It does not use pollen or seeds but plastic as its basic material, and makes skeletons that are capable of walking in the wind. Jansen wants the beach beasts to be able to live without him, for his work to continue when he is gone.

He starts from the study of biological evolution to develop successive generations of increasingly complex creatures. To bring these creatures to life, he uses simple materials from the industrial age. In his book The Great Pretender, Theo Jansen acknowledges that the real inspiration for his beasts was the yellowish-colored electrical wiring tubes, which are typical for the Netherlands. These bone-like ducts are the main material of beach animals. Jansen bought 50 kilometers of plastic tube in his day and avoids any material other than that, although he used wooden pallets for a very short time.

The resistant and lightweight insulating plastic tubes or hoses of electrical installations will become the basis of your creatures, which little by little take the form of skeletons of animals or giant insects. Jansen's goal is to develop living organisms capable of self-sufficient walking and survival. The windy beaches of Holland, near the artist's studio, are the natural habitat of these rudimentary and fascinating creatures that take advantage of the force of the wind to move.

The Strandbeest (beach beasts) break the traditional concept of sculpture and generate an aesthetic experience through movement. In a way, they could be defined as "kinetic sculptures", but Theo Jansen's work goes further, he ventures into nature without a fixed destination, he lets himself be guided by contact with materials. This creative process also follows times marked by nature. The animals are born in October and take their first steps in a litter box during the fall and winter. In spring they go to the beach and the artist experiments with them throughout the summer until they are extinct. The goal of these evolutionary cycles and these generations of creatures is to create faster, more complex, and more autonomous creatures.