Concordia conference : Theo Jansen interviewed by Christine Redfern (Montreal Gazette)

He takes the wind, uses his '12 holy numbers' to make kinetic sculptures stand up and walk

CHRISTINE REDFERN , Montreal Gazette

Concordia University brought Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen to Montreal recently as part of its Defiant Imagination lecture series. His talk was so popular he filled the D.B. Clarke Theatre - twice. Jansen's career path started in engineering, then switched to painting. Yet he eventually rose to fame when he launched a flying saucer (I'm not making this up).
In 1980, his homemade UFO floated across Holland's misty skies and had people believing for a few days that they had witnessed a spaceship. Since then, he has focused his creativity on building a herd of kinetic sculptures, designed to live on the Netherlands' windy beaches. I had a chance to talk with him about these magical creatures when he was in town.

CR: Your Strandbeests (Beach Beasts) are so otherworldly when you see them. Was there a specific eureka moment when you were developing them?
TJ: One night in 1991 after the first animal was finished, I remember thinking that I could make it a lot simpler by making it with two limbs and only one crank as the backbone. A few hours later that same night, I built a 3-D model in an Atari computer and wrote a program that used the principles of evolution. Following a process of selection and reproduction, the computer went on for months, day and night, and at the end 12 numbers came out. Those numbers represented the 12 lengths of tubing I needed to make the sculptures move on the level. It was a really big breakthrough. That is why I call them the 12 holy numbers, because it is thanks to those numbers that the animals walk so nicely. It is also the only real invention, because everything that came later - the wind stomach and the muscles, the nerve cells and the brains of the animal - are all based on knowledge that already exists. But this walking system, it is my invention.
CR: What makes them move?
TJ: They get their energy from the wind. The most recent ones can also move in wind silences. Their wings are no longer connected directly to their feet, but to pumps, which pump air into plastic soda bottles. That is the wind stomach. They can use the energy that is in there when the tide comes up and the wind is gone to push themselves toward the dunes and save their lives.
CR: They look like they are so high-tech, but really they are made from such low-tech, cheap materials: packing tape, empty plastic bottles, yellow tubing.
TJ: It is one of the principles my work is based on, that my path is dictated by the limitations of my material. I think real creation has the same theme. We are mostly made of protein, not too many other materials are in our body, our skin, our eyes. Yet, as we see in 400 million years of evolution, if you have enough time, you can build a lot of life from simple materials.
CR: Is there anybody else working in a manner similar to yours?
TJ: One guy was an example for me; his name is Gerrit van Bakel. He died in the 1980s, when he was 42. He made a steel machine that worked on the difference in temperature between day and night. Each night the metal would shrink, in the day it would expand and make a little movement. It moved forward about three centimetres a year.
CR: Was he an artist as well?
TJ: Yes, an engineer wouldn't put up with that. I like this kind of playing with time. When Africa and South America were attached, that is about the same speed that they moved away from each other.
CR: How do you see the relationship between art and science?
TJ: My sculptures are in a BMW ad (see youtube.com/watch?v=IhPbXD6QmPg). And what I say in the ad is, "The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds." And that is what I really think is true. When I'm working on my animals, I am working just on function, just like an engineer. And usually, when it is finished it doesn't function that well, but it became beautiful.
Myself, I am surprised as well, that something that just follows its function can become beautiful. There is something mythical in there, as if I didn't make them. It is as if they made themselves.