Strandbeest

The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen Lena Herzog & Lawrence Weschler

Taschen 2014

Hb, 328pp, illus, £34.99, ISBN 978386548496

FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £31.49

In 1990, Theo Jansen noticed that the high tides of each passing season seemed to be registering higher up the beaches of the Low Countries. He planned to find a way to transfer sand grains from the bottom of the beach to the top in order to maintain the giant dunes, using wind-powered creatures he called Strandbeests. By the end of the following year, he had a walking mechanism consisting of 11 segments, and had discovered the ‘magic ratios’ that allowed the legs to make long, slow strides. None of this was based on living creatures; he generated the ratios via computer algorithm in a kind of natural selection. Cantilevered sails power the beasts, and compressed air is stored in plastic ‘lungs’ for when the wind drops. “They are assembled in fact from solid shafts of air protected by a thin layer of plastic,” he says. Each new generation of Beests is classified with a Latin name.

“They are very much alive,” says Jansen, but this book is unable to capture that. Instead, we have large stills of Jansen and his Beests. Deprived of their main purpose, they look like tubular sculptures. Without the centipede-motion of the legs, or the gracefully waving sails that gives the Beests a claim to being an artificial lifeform, the book falls far short of conveying their other-worldliness. The engineer wishing to study Jansen’s methods will find next to no technical information. Those wanting to see the Beests gliding eerily across the beaches will find no DVD to show their full glory. This is a photographer’s book that freezes the Beests into sculptural forms, but misses what makes Jansen’s creations so special.