The Engineering of the Strandbeest: How the Magnificent Mech…

Life evolves, but machines are invent­ed: this dichoto­my hard­ly con­flicts with what most of us have learned about biol­o­gy and tech­nol­o­gy. But cer­tain spec­i­mens roam­ing around in the world can blur that line — and in the curi­ous case of the Strand­beesten, they real­ly are roam­ing around. First assem­bled in 1990 by the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, a Strand­beest (Dutch for “beach beast”) is a kind of wind-pow­ered kinet­ic sculp­ture designed to “walk” around the sea­side in an organ­ic-look­ing fash­ion. Jansen has made them not just ever larg­er and more elab­o­rate over the decades, but also more sta­ble and more resilient, with an eye toward their even­tu­al­ly out­liv­ing him.

Improv­ing the Strand­beest has been a long process of tri­al and error, as explained in the Ver­i­ta­si­um video above. Jansen’s process espe­cial­ly resem­bles bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion in that the changes he makes to his cre­ations tend to be retained or dis­card­ed in accor­dance with the degree to which they assist in adap­ta­tion to their sandy, watery envi­ron­ment.

Get­ting them to walk upright in the sand was hard enough, and ulti­mate­ly required com­put­er mod­el­ing to deter­mine just the right angles at which to con­nect their joints. But the joints them­selves have also demand­ed improve­ment, giv­en that the rig­ors of a Strand­beest’s “life” neces­si­tate both flex­i­bil­i­ty and dura­bil­i­ty.

We’ve fea­tured Jansen and his Strand­beesten more than once here on Open Cul­ture, but this new video reveals anoth­er dimen­sion of his life­long project: to keep them from walk­ing into the sea. This chal­lenge has led him to build “brains” that detect when a Strand­beest has drawn too close to the water. Con­struct­ed with sim­ple mechan­i­cal valves, these sys­tems are rem­i­nis­cent of not just the neu­rons in our own heads, but also of the col­lec­tions of bina­ry switch­es that, assem­bled in much greater num­bers, have tech­no­log­i­cal­ly evolved into the basis of the dig­i­tal devices that we use every day. While a com­put­er can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly last for­ev­er, a liv­ing crea­ture can’t — and nor, so far, can a Strand­beest. But now that Jansen has dis­cov­ered their “genet­ic code,” inven­tors all over the world have already begun their own work prop­a­gat­ing this diverse, cap­ti­vat­ing species world­wide.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Behold the Strand­beest, the Mechan­i­cal Ani­mals That Roam the Beach­es of Hol­land