Theo Jansen's Strandbeests Are Marvels Of Tube-Engineering

By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 8, 2016 4:02PM

Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests belong on the beach. They were literally made for it, and named for it; Strandbeest is Dutch for “beach animal.” As of Friday, though, they’re here in Chicago at the Cultural Center, standing on display platforms instead of sand, swarmed by crowds of people who mysteriously know about them (perhaps through this BMW commercial? Or Jansen’s TedTalk?)—even though the beests move best propelled by wind, and even on beaches shouldn’t be crowded.

It’s unnatural, but it’s hard to get too indignant about that, since Strandbeests themselves are unnatural. Jansen has built them out of PVC tubes, tied together at a lot of their joints with tough, plasticky strips that stick out crazily, like old-man hair.

Since the earliest Strandbeest, which Jansen made more than 25 years ago (and which couldn’t even stand, according to the New Yorker), beests have evolved increasingly complex organs: lung-like arrays of water bottles, rubber tubes for sensing the ocean’s edge, and “sweat glands” that help them excrete sand buildup from their frames. Still, it’s safe to say animal rights activists aren’t going to protest this exhibit.

Jansen himself calls the Strandbeests “animals,” though, and he has reason to, sort of. The Strandbeests move on their own. That’s their whole appeal: They look like weird, laddery sculptures, but then a gust of wind fills their sails and they take off, galloping and trotting on feet that look like wads of garbage but are surprisingly graceful on sand.

The beests at least take off when the wind hits them in theory. Getting them to move is a finicky business—one Jansen is still perfecting at his beachfront workshop in the Netherlands. Often, the beests need a bit of human assistance to get going, hence the attendants at the Cultural Center exhibit wearing neon yellow shirts with “Beest Wrangler” printed on the back.

Still, when the Strandbeests move how they’re meant to, it looks somehow organic. Perhaps it’s because they genuinely evolved over years of iteration, and aren’t imitating another animal’s walk, as Jansen hypothesized in the New York Times in 2014. Whatever the reason, it’s hard not to connect to them emotionally when they move, even though they’re faceless. (A Strandbeest “snout” was mentioned in the New York Times, but personally, I never found one at the exhibit.)

Here. Watch this video of Strandbeests in motion, which has more than a million views on Youtube, for yourself:

See? That’s Strandbeests at their best: alone, except for occasional cameos from Jansen, on a pristine Dutch beach.

The Cultural Center tries to bring the wonder of Strandbeests in their natural (ish) habitat, as much as possible, into the exhibit. In one room, a giant video of a Strandbeest in motion, much like the one above, is projected in an endless loop, cut through with disorienting closeups of the Strandbeest’s gyrating tubes. Photos of Strandbeests on desolate beaches hang on the exhibit’s walls, too, all of them shot by Lena Herzog. In some shots, vaguely reminiscent of engagement photos, Jansen gazes at a beest, or conducts tender beest repairs.

There’s more to the exhibit, of course, than attempts to recreate a beach setting indoors. It’s also a paradise for architecture and engineering enthusiasts; Strandbeests have been exhibited in science and art museums alike, as the New Yorker notes. At the Cultural Center, there’s an entire room is dedicated to “fossils,” too, a.k.a. Strandbeest component parts. Visitors can check out short segments of PVC tubing, some with open ends, some with their ends crudely banged closed. There are also more complex tube structures on display, which look like forts made out of dry pasta, or K’Nex creations, or off-brand marimbas, or model bridges.

In another room, a display explores the mechanics of Strandbeests’ legs. These were the most complex part of the creatures to engineer, according to Jansen, probably because walking is an inherently weird process. ‘'In its essence,'’ Jansen told the New York Times, ‘'walking is simply constantly changing your shape in such a way that you move forward.'’

(Walking is an especially weird process for Strandbeests, because they need at least twelve legs to be able to stand in a stable way, Jansen told Vogue in August.)

Strandbeests do walk, though, on legs made up of 11 tube segments each. Jansen found the optimal ratio between all the parts’ lengths—the “holy numbers,” as he calls them—using an algorithm that basically simulated evolution, forcing ratios to compete against each other, bracket-style, until only one triumphant ratio remained. The engineering process is all laid out on a table, with an explanatory panel and a model leg you can move with a crank.

Looping videos of Jansen play on select walls of the exhibit, adding context to all the tube displays. In one video, Jansen—tall, thin, white-haired—explained what initially sparked the Strandbeest project. It began with an article he wrote for a Dutch newspaper in 1990. The seas, Jansen pointed out long before it was trendy to notice, were rising, and the Netherlands would need giant sand dunes to protect its below-sea-level stretches. Jansen initially intended his Strandbeests as a wind-powered, self-sustaining maintenance crew for these dunes.

Now, though, Jansen has become more interested in the beests for their own sake, the New York Times reports, and the crowds at the Cultural Center were on the same page. No one was there to see the beests perform useful chores. We were there to see them move, and in the exhibit’s finale, we got to.

Here’s another video of Strandbeests in motion, just because it feels appropriate here:

The exhibit’s last room was its biggest room, with high ceilings and some peripheral displays showing tiny, 3D-printed beests that evoked a deranged Christmas village. The room’s main event, though, was the beest on a platform, moving slightly. This was was what the Cultural Center terms a “reanimation” on its website, and everyone, even people who couldn’t really see, stared raptly towards it. I was stuck towards the back, and missed a lot of the experience: Jansen’s voice narrated over a loudspeaker, but I couldn’t quite hear him. (I also never saw him in real life, though my friend and I did find at least ten old, tall white men who resembled him, and gasped at each one as if he were Beyoncé.) The crowd was too dense for me to get a good view of the reanimation, either—but I heard the Strandbeest exhaling wheezily from its water bottle lungs, and saw some of its upper tubes and sails shift.

In the end, I was okay with being a bad Strandbeest spectator, too. More than the show, the crowd felt like the point. Lured there by co-signs from BMW and TED and fancy magazines, we were all enthralled by Jansen and his project.

But neither Jansen nor the Strandbeests were made for crowds. Jansen is, and I say this respectfully, a weird loner. He spends a lot of his time solo, tinkering with tube creations—and he hopes even these tube creations will become self-sufficient enough to leave him alone.

“I want to put these forms of life on the beaches, and they should survive out there on their own in the future,” Jansen said in his TedTalk.

The beests, like Jansen, are loners. They need space to catch the wind, and space to run or trot or whatever you want to call the amazing thing they do. The whole project has solitude baked into it, so much so that I felt kind of guilty for being part of the horde cooing over the beests. (Other members of the horde: People who were evidently University of Chicago grad students; people speaking languages other than English; a grown-ass man who brought his skateboard to the exhibit with him, and clutched it to his chest as he explored.)

The exhibit is fantastic, and shows the years of work and engineering and tube-breakage behind the surreal beests; at the same time, it shows how love can be smothering. We want to be close to these tube-creatures, and so we've trapped them in this Cultural Center exhibit where we can touch them—but we only want to touch them because of what they look like frolicking alone, on a YouTube beach continents away. I bet at least one couple broke up on their way home on Friday.

“Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen” will be at the Chicago Cultural Center until May 1.