Strandbeests in America

Theo Jansen's famous Strandbeests are coming to America, a tour organized by the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Jansen told Lawrence Wechsler of the Times how they came about. It started when Jansen, who majored in physics in college, read Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (1986):

The next few minutes were given over to a passionate disquisition on stick insects. In the distant past, Jansen said, channeling Dawkins, there were nakedly vulnerable insects and dim-sighted birds, but over time some of those insects, through random, accidental mutation, began looking more and more like sticks, while to counter this tendency, their bird predators (again through random, accidental mutation) developed progressively sharper vision. The two creatures, as it were, created each other. 

This led Jansen to make pairs of digital creatures on his Atari, programming them to co-evolve and watching the results, marveling as they grew ever more complex and adaptive. He moved on to trying to model how walking might have evolved:

‘'In its essence,'’ he said, ‘'walking is simply constantly changing your shape in such a way that you move forward. But how exactly does it work?'’

And it was in the midst of those cogitations that, as Jansen himself was walking along the Scheveningen shore one day, the thought entered his head that maybe he ‘'should pay a visit to the Gamma hardware store and check out their plastic tubing.'’ He bought a length of standard PVC pipe (the kind that surrounds cable and electrical conduits) and took it back to his studio. And it was around that same time that he experienced his finger-in-the-dike epiphany, going on to publish that seminal strandbeest proposal.

He told me how his first experiments, in the early ’90s, were ‘'sad, pathetic, really hopeless'’ affairs (‘'I was so naïve'’). He used tape to connect the PVC rods, but the creatures kept tearing and collapsing from their own weight; nor did he seem able to get them to walk properly. He advanced from tape to tie-cords, and that was somewhat better, though the walking mechanism was still all wrong. He was lost in a maze of sines and cosines, mapping out legs with two separate cranks, one for the upper limb and one for the lower, differing in phase by 90 degrees. The breakthrough, or rather two major breakthroughs, occurred on a single night, at the end of 1991. First he realized that the leg could have a far simpler structure if a single crank were moved up to the hip joint. (He proceeded to demonstrate all this for me on a plywood-board model he often takes to classes and lectures.) The leg itself would need to be fashioned out of 13 rods, pivoting in relation to one another, so that everything would depend on the specific ratio of the lengths of the 13 segments, one to another. The goal would be to create a long, slow stride with gentle curves planting the leg onto the ground and then pulling it up in order to quickly bring it back to the front of the next long stride.

But how to determine those ratios? There were millions, probably billions, of possible combinations of the 13 figures, and even a computer working its way through all of them in brute sequence, especially in those days, would most likely take centuries to evaluate them all. But — and here came his second breakthrough of the night, a reversion to his Dawkins ideal — what if, once again drawing on those earlier experiments, he were instead to program an algorithm whereby thousands of sets of ratios could randomly compete against one another, the best virtual performers advancing forward as the basis for a new generation, generation after generation, until the algorithm itself naturally brought forth the best solution? He tried it, and his Atari chugged away literally for months, but eventually he had the magic ratios, 13 specific numbers (a=38, b=41.5, c=39.3, d=40.1, e=55.8, and so forth) that were to form the proportional basis for all the walking beasts that followed.

Jansen insists that his beasts are not just an art project or an engineering exercise, but an actual model of how life originates and evolves. He may have strange ideas about life, but the Strandbeests are certainly amazing. They will be at Art Basel Miami in the spring of 2015, Salem in the fall of 2015, then on to the Chicago Cultural Center and then probably other destinations.

Toy Strandbeests

Remember Theo Jansen's Strandbeests, the wonderful walking sculptures?

Well, now you can 3D print your own toy versions.

Links 21 November 2025

Mosaic in the House of the Boar, Pompeii

Thirty-four years of Strandbeests, 22-minute video.

Jeremy Horpedahl, "Four charts to overcome your pessimism about how recent generations are doing economically."

Reuters says 600 Americans were fired for comments posted after Charlie Kirk's assassination.

The sea wolves of western Canada (see here) have been videotaped raiding traps set for invasive green crabs. (YouTube, CBC, NY Times) Lots of blaph about whether this means wolves "use tools," but I would put it under the category of general cleverness.

A pretentious intellectual visits Las Vegas, has a good time.

Tyler Cowen interviews Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic, lots of wild transportation talk.

People going against the status quo are more likely to be confidently wrong.

Moss spores that spent nine months in space germinated when they were brought back to earth.

Max Stirner's radical individualism, 53-minute lecture from Wes Cecil. You can think that Stirner was a narcissist but he was dead right about Marx and Engels and their worship of abstractions.

Piers Taylor celebrates "deeper and messier architecture," some interesting buildings.

A claim that the English may have gotten more intelligent, genetically, in modern times and that this explains the Industrial Revolution. Maybe people are getting smarter – there is other evidence of this – but any association with the Industrial Revolution is suspect because the authors present no comparative data from China, where a rich civilization full of smart people did not industrialize.

A strange Viking burial with scallop shells on her face. 

Study finds that Brexit reduced the GDP of the UK by 6-8%.

Sculpted reliefs of theatrical masks found at Roman site in Turkey.

New experiment shows that under one particular set of conditions, readers, including MFA students, prefer the literary output of ChatGPT over that of human authors.

Catalan artist Jaume Plensa's humanist scuptures.

Tyler Cowen on AI poetry. I find most contemporary poetry unreadable, so I would be happy to have more good stuff from any source.

Richard Hanania shreds Patrick Deneen's "post-liberal" philosophy.

New study: "Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing."

Somehow they have persuaded some Brits to run across the landscape while being hunted by baying hounds.

Nuts on the woke right copy nuts on the woke left, now with fake hate crimes (New Jersey Globe, Twitter/X)

A long past post that has gotten a bunch of views lately: Free Love, which used the catastrophic romantic experience of the Shelly/Byron circle to show that the traditional wisdom about marriage is correct.

Europe is not ready for war with Russia (Twitter/X). All this tweeter says is true, but I think he vastly overrates the threat. A force that can't take Pokrovsk is not storming into Warsaw. Yes, drones are awesome and Russia has a ton of them, but Israel just showed they're not much use against F-35s.

There are so many fiber optic lines lying across fields along the front line in Ukraine that Russian soldiers get tangled in them, in this case making the soldier unable to avoid an oncoming drone.

Lots of economists and foreign policy types are saying that the Russian economy is in terrible shape. Most do not think that it is likely to collapse, but Russia's ability to fund the war keeps decreasing and the long-term cost to the nation keeps mounting. On YouTube: Professor Gerdes, Jason Jay Smart, Nigel-Gould Davies, Perun. Text articles: Atlantic Council, Meduza. Summary from one of these speakers: "Time is no longer on Russia's side." And here is a claim from Russian media that half the nation's clothing shops have closed.

Short video showing 100 interceptions of Shahed-type drones by Wild Hornets interceptor drones.

Strandbeests

Wonderful kinetic sculptures by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. You can watch videos of these in motion here.