Zahra Jamal
Art 101-1
Sarah Hanrahan Apple
12/14/2014
Theo Jansen Strandbeest
Theo Jansen is a Dutch Artist born in the Netherlands, he studied physics and had a great skill for it and also for art. From his interest in both it seems as if he greatly enjoys projects. “Jansen’s artistic career began in 1980 with the creation and subsequent launch in Delft of a ‘UFO’ – a 4 meter-long artifact filled with helium and driven by lights and sounds”.(cityvision) “A few years later he developed the painting machine, equipped with a mechanism that was able to recognize lights and shadow then play back the image of an object through a life-size photorealistic rendering”. (cityvision) The UFO and he painting machine were the very first couple of projects he did. The UFO project created quite the chaos that its sightings are found in police records. The painting machine however is also incredible. This machine only paints in the dark and it paints it to the exact size of the object and …show more content…
He has made these creatures from yellow plastic tubes and they are not just sculptures of work that are to be observed in a museum where they stand still but sculptures that physically move on their own. He is making them creatures of the earth that live and survive on their own on sandy beaches, which is their natural habitat. It seems as if these creatures were inspired by his earlier works in life of the UFO and the paint machine. This is because the earlier projects reacted to lights, sound, and darkness and these creatures are built to react to dunes and the sea. Strandbeests are built or created to stay between the sea and the dry land, the sand, and they can retract back to where they need to be because of feeler bottles that they have built in them. Out of the many strandbeests Jansen has created Animaris Currens Vulgaris,… and ….are the one that will be talked about in this