A WINDY beach in the Netherlands. A strange creature is coming towards you. It looks like a piece of elaborate scaffolding, six metres long, four wide and three high, and it sounds like a horde of clockwork locusts. It is made of bright yellow plastic tubes and has a flapping sail on its back, rather like the fin on a dinosaur. And it walks on dozens of legs that prance one after the other with a strange kind of biological deliberateness.
Ten years ago, Dutch artist Theo Jansen began using the principles of natural selection to create art that evolves. Since then, a whole herd of these creatures has emerged from his workshop. But why on Earth would anyone spend ten years of their life producing a series of cumbersome, elaborate constructions that do no more than walk down Dutch beaches for a few days a year? 鈥淚 try to remake nature with the idea that by doing this, you will uncover the secrets of life,鈥� says Jansen.
His first unsteady beach animal-or strandbeest as it is called in Dutch, somehow more fittingly-evolved into one that would walk if you pushed it. The addition of sails allowed a succession of beasts to walk unaided down the beach-provided the wind was right and nothing jammed. More recent beach animals are powered by a windmill blade, which Jansen sculpts out of polystyrene pellets and Sellotape. Lately the creatures have evolved into a high-backed form, which moves faster but blows over more easily, and a low-backed form, which withstands the gusts. Speciation seems imminent.
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Not bad, for a physicist. Jansen worked on a graduate degree in acoustics in the 1970s, but the hippie culture of the era was a big influence, and the degree never quite happened. Somehow splitting to London and painting smoky, realist portraits made more sense.
But scientific urges still gnawed at him. In the 1980s, back in Delft, Jansen experimented with what are now known as evolutionary computer algorithms. Within his Atari computer, a population of sperm-like worms mutated and recombined, evolving spontaneously into crooked worms. But in 1990 Jansen started dreaming of a bigger, more public beast-one with legs. That meant, he decided, hitching rigid beams together at angles that would transmit the revolving motion of a crankshaft to a foot. The foot would have a sort of ovoid motion, hitting the ground, pushing back, then arching up and forward to repeat the cycle (see Diagram).
The path followed by the foot-and hence the leg鈥檚 efficiency-depends on the relative lengths of the beams linking it to the revolving power source, he explains, talking animatedly of sines, cosines and angular motion with an ease that would leave most artists in a cold sweat. There are 12 critical lengths. Varying any of them changes the motion of the foot. Trying all possible permutations would perplex a Pentium, never mind Jansen鈥檚 now-ancient Atari. So he chose 1500 permutations, and imposed selection criteria: the foot must hit the ground at an angle where it will not get jammed; it must push back in a straight line; it must spend minimum time in the air.
He left the Atari running day and night for a month while his 1500 virtual animals raced each other to see whose legs worked best. He then chose the fastest 100 and let them compete. But to allow the legs to evolve, he let the Atari make small 鈥渕istakes鈥� in the lengths of the components for each iteration.
With this information, Jansen built the first beach animal-genus Animaris, from the Latin for animal and sea, species vulgaris. Sadly, A. vulgaris collapsed in the studio. Jansen admits sheepishly that it took him three years to learn how to bend and lash together the plastic tubes, which normally serve as conduits for electrical wires in buildings, rigidly enough to support the animal鈥檚 weight and move without bending or jamming. The tubing may be awkward to work with, but at least it鈥檚 cheap. Jansen鈥檚 biggest creation to date contains a kilometre of tubes, yet cost a mere $100.
A. currens, the next generation, walked when you pushed on the crankshaft. But it doesn鈥檛 look truly alive if you have to push it, so for his next incarnation, A. currens ventosa, Jansen added two huge, saurian sails. They flap back and forth in the wind, rotating the crankshaft, and in theory moving the legs. 鈥淚t never got enough wind,鈥� admits Jansen, who went back to pushing. But it does look wonderful.
A smaller winged beast, A. sabulosa, did walk-until it hit soft, dry sand, or water, where its feet couldn鈥檛 get a grip. Jansen added two gearwheels, painstakingly made from the rigid yellow tubes. They look like complex artefacts from a culture that had nothing to work with but bright yellow bamboo. A string that wraps around the gears changes their size when the animal stalls, and this changes its direction. So A. sabulosa zigzags between water and dry sand like a huge, determined sandpiper. A curved tail collects sand as it moves, and dumps the pile when it changes direction. Jansen says, with a straight face, that herds of these beasts will one day protect the Dutch coast from rising sea levels.
The animals draw crowds, and Jansen feels it important to explain their origins to his audience. The Netherlands harbours more religious opposition to evolution than any other European country. 鈥淲hen I was growing up,鈥� Jansen recalls, 鈥淚 wasn鈥檛 sure who Darwin was, but I thought he was some sort of criminal. Like Karl Marx.鈥� Now he knows better.
One wonders what Dutch creationists make of the latest incarnation, a herd of seven windmill-driven A. geneticus, which evolve on the spot. Jansen changes the leg components of the herd to match whichever was fastest on each stroll. 鈥淓ven I don鈥檛 know why some work and some don鈥檛,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t really is evolution.鈥� Now he wants to use air-powered pistons to make a snake-like beast that changes motion depending on which bits touch the sand, giving it a kind of sensory ability.
At his home in Delft, Jansen seems the soul of the European enlightenment-learned, logical and able to devote all his energies to something merely on the strength of an idea. The idea just happens to be building evolving beach animals out of electrical conduit. Many Europeans have picked worse.
Why does he do it? 鈥淚 prefer doing things to talking about them,鈥� he says. 鈥淎rtists think it鈥檚 science, scientists say it鈥檚 art. What I hope is that I will learn something really new.鈥� Aren鈥檛 the animals all based on mechanical principles people already know? 鈥淧erhaps,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut they never used them to make beach animals.鈥�
- Some of Theo Jansen鈥檚 creations can be seen at the engineering department of the Technical University of Delft from October onwards