Theo Jansen: Strand Beests

Theo Jansen: Animaris Currens Ventosa

In the last few years, a number of projects that deal with complex motion generated by simple oscillation appeared. Sodaplay, Sw3d, Modulobe and probably others. Except Sodaplay, I was never too enthusiastic about these projects. They didn’t have the elegance of their 2D counterparts, they were more about struts and wires and too little about art. And you can see that from the design of the interface, to the ergonomics of the program. I could start a rant about “what if the design of the interface influenced the models” but I won’t (feel free to do so in your comments). Maybe the 3D adds a layer of complexity that hinders the minimal gracefulness of the organisms, maybe they are just not as fascinating to a non-tech-head like me.

Then I stumbled upon this. Extremely complicated, *very* 3D, compelling. Too bad I couldn’t find out more about the technical aspects. They are built from plastic tubes, and Mr. Jansen wants to build and entire herd and set them free on beaches in Sweden, like some lost tribe of self-transforming-alien-machines. They are built by a prcess wich mimics the Darwinian natural selection; they are put to race on the beach, the winner replicated with some modifications then the whole process reiterated. Today, his beasts can live/walk on their own a few minutes before intervention is required, but Mr. Jansen has plans to make them autonomous by incorporating racing and self altering behaviour, only then will they truly evolve as Darwinian living, walking, thinking, plastic beasts.

Psychogeography was an age-old respected academic buzzword steeped in Freudo-Marxist terminology: a bon-mot to talk about, not to actually do. Psychogeo drifts tended to be ‘free’ and ‘unretrained’ because guided by instinct and play, but really therefore restricted by prejudices or pre-conceived notions of what are interesting place to head to. Generative psychogeography, ‘invented’ by socialfiction.org in 2001 sought to sidestep taste and the human sense of purpose by applying simple rules to direct the walker. For instance:

first street left
second street left
first street right
repeat

the result is a route that runs counter to any intuition you might have of a walk: the route is hard to predict and very unhumanlike. There are, it seems, two responses when people first hear of it : 1)either want to try it out and see where it takes you 2) you don’t get it and you never will.

socialfiction.org/psychogeography