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Interview: Theo Jansen, strandbeest.com
Apr 13, 2005
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist and creator of "beach creatures" - huge wind-powered walking machines made of little more than plastic tubing and glue.
Theo's site - strandbeest.com - contains movies of the creatures in action. Click on "film" (small link in the center column), then on any of the links on the next page.
It's hard to picture without seeing the movies, but there's a strange, miraculous beauty to the "strandbeests." Note the richness Theo is able to elicit from from such simple materials.
I recently interviewed Theo in preparation for his appearance at my upcoming Gel 2005 conference in New York.
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Q - How did you start creating your beach creatures?
15 years ago, after writing a newspaper column about the idea, I went to the store and bought some tubes. I was planning to spend one year on the project, but I got addicted.
Q - What's an average day?
Every day I work on function, just trying to make it work, and not that much on "art." Usually it doesn't function - nine out of ten times. But once in ten, it does function, and I build up enough optimism to continue.
Q - Do you consider it art in the end?
Yes, but it's also scientific project, though in a way other than how scientists usually work. I'm limited in material, and that forces me to search in a sort of jungle of ideas. The path isn't straight, goes very slowly, but I'm moving forward a bit. Usually scientists are more in a hurry.
Q - How do you "evolve" a new animal?
It goes in pieces. Often I take old parts and reanimate them. People ask me, how many animals have I made now? I don't know. A lot of them I started but then stopped because I saw that it wouldn't work. There are many parts, you could call them fossils, that are lying on the hill that I work on.
Q - How do you think about yourself as creator?
I see myself as a sort of Don Quixote, fighting to find explanations for life, and still knowing that it's impossible to explain everything. But still you can find some truth in things, without knowing everything. When you're playing God like I do, every day, and you come upon the same problems which the real Creator must have had while creating this all, you can feel more or less what he felt, if he is there, when making a creation.
Q - Will these creatures live on in some fashion?
They can do it in two ways. They might live on the beach; the guy who works for me, he's quite young, and he knows how to build them now. Maybe after I'm dead he can keep the beach animals alive, and he could get a pupil as well, and maybe it could go on for some generations.
But it would take several generations to make the beach animals truly independent from us. Today, every five minutes I have to do something to repair them again. But that's longer than it was before; it used to be a few seconds. Storms, especially, are terrible for these beasts, but they're surviving them better now. There must be a point where this period could go to weeks, or months even. They'll need a way to repair themselves, and to multiply. They do that already a bit, but I have to help them very much doing that.
It's a sort of symbiosis. I live on these beasts - they give me income - and they live on me, because they need me to make them. You could also say they make me make them. It's already a life form that lives in the media. Many people understand what I'm doing without my having told them; even children, they don't know anything about evolution, but when they look at a beach creature they seem to understand what I'm doing. It's strange. Even in nature - butterflies need flowers, and flowers can't work without worms - everything depends on each other. It's a big symbiosis of many creatures. So the beach animals fit in there.
