A Wind-Powered Herd of Beach Animals Merge Into a Storm Defense System in Theo Jansen’s Latest ‘Strandbeest’
A brand new 18-meter-long Strandbeest scuttles across the sands of a beach in The Netherlands in a short video by Dutch artist Theo Jansen (previously), who has been releasing his otherworldly creatures into the world each year since 1990.
Throughout the summer, Jansen experimented with connecting several units together, which could work in succession. “Animaris Rex is a herd of beach animals whose specimens hold each other as defense against storms,” he says. “As individuals they would simply blow over, but as a group, the chance of surviving a storm would be greater.” Propelled by the wind with a series of large sails, the individual modules move in tandem to form a single entity.