We tend to go on lots of small trips with interesting destinations rather than long holidays in one place (like a beach for example). My girlfriend has a gift for picking out interesting spots. Yesterday we visited Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest Mortuarium which is located in a hangar in the Dutch city of Delft.

I had not heard of this artist before, but The Simpsons and Adam Savage apparently have!

Theo makes beast like contraptions out of PVC tubing that can walk using wind power. Interesting to me was this note in his workplace corner of the mortuarium, right above the Atari ST: “Thanks to these numbers, the animals walk the way they do. I wrote a computer program (on the ATARI) based on evolution to find out these numbers. The computer was on day and night for months.”.

There is no patent on Theo’s findings and calculations. Everyone is free to reproduce the walking mechanism and thus create new “offspring” of his creatures.

I consider making a simulation in perhaps p5.js using Theo’s calculations some time in the future.

–m