Tuesday, December 20, 2005 | Permalink
“Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”
And you could release these creatures in the arid, wind-swept open spaces of Antarctica as well. Wait a decade or so until its ice caps have melted away, and watch them scamper about over newly revealed soil. With pollens, seeds and alien microbes gestating inside their skeletal yellow plastic tubes, they'll plant new orchards and forests, maybe a farm or two, like an army of robotic Johnny Appleseeds.
Or how about dropping them over Chernobyl and future sites of nuclear devastation? Using the ample ambient radiation as their power source, they'll proceed to deposit phytoremediating flora and fauna. The primary emergency response to apocalyptic disasters.
Or let's send them to Mars or Titan or some extrasolar planet. A new breed of intergalactic planetary landscape architect capable of exploration and/or terraforming: fast, cheap, and out of control.
Powered this time by dust devils, they will seed entire ecosystems, cultivating and pruning for centuries. And even when the planet has been fully colonized, they will still be marching across the landscapes they had created. Though inorganic and extraterrestrial they may be, no one will dispute that they are an inalienable element of the planet's natural history.
And the colony's mythology as well. Around machine oxygenated campfires across the planet, terraformers will entertain themselves with stories of Creation that might as well have been written by Ovid. “The Animaris geneticus wasn't manufactured by Theo Jansen in collaboration with NASA,” these future Aesops and fabulists will say, “but rather the result of incestuous and bestial trysts of the gods.”
Or as a way of maintaining social cohesion in a still unforgiving place, colonists will scare their extaterrestrial children with ghost stories of disobedient youths snatched from their beds in the middle of the night by these ancient beasts, who then imprisoned them inside their skeletal frame as their pneumatic creaking-clicking-trilling howls fill the terraformed air.
Strandbeest / Theo Jansen
Strandbeestmovie
Labels: machines
I read your article at your website about Theo Jansen and I take the liberty to inform you about my film „strandbeesten“. It is a documentary about Theo Jansen and his work.
For this project I have a website like a diary during the production process. If you are interested in our film you will find more information on http://www.strandbeestmovie.com
From 22nd June until 6 th July we accompany Theo Jansen to London. There he has an exhibition at ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) and the strandbeesten will walk on the Trafalgar Square. I try to write an article each day about our shooting.
Thank you very much for your attention. Please feel free to inform your friends about my website. Best regards,
Alexander Schlichter
http://www.strandbeest.es
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