Q&A: Theo Jansen

LONDON, England (CNN) -- CNN met Theo Jansen in his studio outside Delft in Netherlands.

Can you describe what a Strandbeest is?

It's a skeleton made of plastic tubing and based on air -- they move on the wind and inside the hollow tubes is air, so mostly they are made of air. They look a little bit like dinosaurs, but when I'm making them I try and forget all the animals I know, I want to make new life. Some might look a bit like crabs or other animals, but that wasn't on purpose, it just because they are the shapes that best survive. These animals have skeletons that can walk on the wind, eat the wind you might say, so they might have a chance to survive in windy places like the beach. This is my life work and I hope that by the end of my life they will be able to live autonomously.

How did you come up with the idea?

I wrote columns for a newspaper, so this was an idea I had for that. I grew up very close to the beach and when I came up with ideas for the paper I would often walk along it. You often get ideas from the environment you're in and it was a place of my youth, which takes you back to looking at ideas in a youthful way. When you're older things are more flat. So the idea really just hit me to use these tubes for animals. Tell us about the materials you use?

The tubes are the tubes that are used to cover electric wiring here in Holland. They're yellow because by law they have to be like that. Kids play with them, shooting paper darts out of them when they are little, and that's how I first started playing around with it. It's also very cheap, only about 10 cents a meter.

Have you transcended the boundaries between art and engineering?

I don't know what that boundary is, so I just do what I do and people call it another thing because they always want to put things in boxes. An Eskimo makes art, but they don't think they're making art, so like that I'm an Eskimo I guess.

I don't have a background in art, but came from a big family. I was supposed to be an engineer so went to university to study physics. But then came the hippie era, which put everyone on a different track and I became a painter for a long time. Then I started a project with a flying saucer, which could really fly. It flew over Delft and caused a lot of commotion with police and local people and was on the TV.

After that I really couldn't go back to painting and all the technical stuff came back to me. I started working with machines that converged into the beasts.

I don't know what the difference is between art and science. I usually just say I'm an artist. When people see my work and they ask what it is, I usually just say its art. Then they don't have any questions anymore.

When I make an animal I'm not making art -- I don't want to be creative, I just want it to function not being creative. Its shape might change and not function too well when it's done, but to me it looks quite nice. It's like there's a secret artist in me that did it without letting me know. The art came in, but not on purpose. Just like real evolution it functions, but it also looks beautiful. Nature didn't try and be creative.

I'm not that much of an engineer, I'm just a trier and I'm not very handy, I'm pretty clumsy in making these things, but I don't give up. I have the patience and optimism to do it - time is my weapon. If a real engineer did it, he might do it in three months with transistors and resistors and aluminium.

These animals look so different because the path to them is very curly. An engineer goes from A to B and takes the highway there. As an artist you go off the highway and go through the woods, the path is determined by the surroundings you're in. You have to cut your way through the trees sometimes, but the advantage is that you come to places that no one else has seen before. You might not ever come to B, but you'll still have a nice time. It's very rewarding when you have an idea and it works out. Sometimes you're not looking for something and then something comes along that you weren't looking for and you think "wow."

Why have you created them?

Being an artist you want to do things, there's not really a reason, you do what you feel and you don't usually ask why you do them. If I look back I think everyone wants to be immortal and I think this is a way for me to do this. It's the same thing as making children; you put down a genetic marker.

People do all sorts of things. They work. Why? For money of course. I suppose I do it because I'm so surprised by our existence and want to find out how we came here by making it new. I also get motivated a lot by people. They appreciate what I do and that motivates me -- I just want to please the world you could say. It was after playing with the tubes on a nice and warm afternoon that I decided to spend a year working on this. That was 17 years ago now.

You might call it a virus in my mind. It's a strange thing; I still love the tubes more or less, and I have found so many ways to do things with them.

How do they move?

The way in which the animals walk is very much dependent on the length of the tubes. To find the right proportion of lengths I wrote an evolution program on a computer to develop the best feet. There is no logic in there, it's just a question of evolution and the movement of the feet is very complex -- I can't see through the mechanics of that. Apart from one of the tests the feet have to pass on the computer program is to make sure they don't take too long to move through the air to give the animal balance. Real animals have the same mechanical principals, which I think is why the strandbeesten look like real animals.

Small pieces of their design come to me. I go from ideas to paper and then back to the idea again and sketch and write it down. Usually the whole animal is done after a few months. But I often spend a year at it just to make improvements. After a year there is a lot of repairs and I get bored of it and then declare it dead. Rather than unhappy I'm glad because I have new ideas for a reborn animal. The death of an old animal is always a good day to feel hopeful about the birth of a new one.

How have they evolved?

Evolution goes by itself, things multiply, but I have to help theses animals with reproducing, but still you have much of the same principle as you're stuck by the limitations of the materials. Every time you learn, you make mutations. Every day I try new things. Nine times out of ten they don't work, so when it does work it really goes to in the future. It's like in the eleven holy numbers that determine how long the tubes are in relation to each other, you can see as eleven genes. They work so well.

Usually I make little sketches to work out the engineering. I don't want to use existing engineering techniques, I just want to go back to a time before engineering existed to discover answers. It makes it hard of course, because you don't have the right tool or a book telling you how to make animals. So usually in the morning I wake at 5am and get ideas at that moment to try out that day.

They don't usually work so I might go home a little depressed and then wait for some thoughts to come to me during the night that will make me optimistic and eager again. So the next day I jump on my bike to the studio and try it out.

Which aspect of it is the most important?

The mechanics and the "brains" are very important. At first it was the rigidness that was of primary importance, then it was the length of the feet, so rally it changes all the time. In the first year the joints were very important, then I found out you could heat the material and you can put it in a certain shape.

There have been seven epochs in the 17 years I've been working on it and each epoch has its own name. The most recent is the "Vaporum," where I'm working on pistons.

With pistons a lot is possible, for example attaching a wing can make things pump up and down. So what I've been using is lemonade bottles as the animals' stomachs to store the wind's energy and use it when there is no wind. In strong winds the animals can break their feet, which is why they need an anchor. On the nose of the animals is a pin and hammer that bangs the pin into the ground in high winds and fixes the animal. The wind may change, but the animal will move so its nose is always pointing into the wind.

Then there is a little tube on the animal, which is the water feeler. Usually it sucks in air, but when it sucks in water from the sea it flicks a switch that makes the animal go in another direction. You can make a kind of brain using basic pressure valves that opens when there is pressure or closes when there isn't any -- a bit a binary code of 1s and zero. In this case a 1 is when there is pressure and a 0 is when there is zero pressure.

If you link them you can make step counters and time mechanism. So as soon as the animal moves away from the sea it counts its steps, so when it goes back in the direction of the sea it knows it doesn't have to go that far before reaching it. In a way these "brain cells" are a primitive form or imagination -- it knows it position on a beach.

Also the tides are very important, so there is a time mechanism in the animal linked to the time of the tides so it knows when high tide is coming. In this model you could say the animal has a concept of the moon and sun in its primitive imagination, at least in an abstract way.

How far do you want them to evolve?

The first animals didn't look very hopeful. But as you see how far I've come, I've surprised myself. I had always hoped it would work, but couldn't predict it would have worked this well. It's taken a long time of course. But they don't rust, the materials don't decay. I've had pieces outside for 16 years and they're still very flexible. So I think they could really work one day and live even longer. I think you could put a herd on the beach and they could develop their walking better by sort of passing genetic information from one animal to the other -- I have ideas about it and just wrote a book called "The Great Pretender," which is me of course.

How do you feel when you release them and do you reflect on what you've done?

I feel very very happy. It's an illness, but its one that makes me feel good. And I do reflect on my work now, I didn't before. I'm very surprised like everyone else that I'm here on this planet as a walking, talking, eating human animal. Of course I want to know what the causes are of this great adventure in life and it might be that you get a bit wiser about existing nature.

I don't know why we're here, but I understand bits. It's like lifting the veil now and then; I don't see the whole thing, but I write about my experience of being god and symmetry, multiplying, and men and women. I guess somehow I'm different from other people, I don't know how that happened, it's probably because I'm an optimistic person. I see things, even if they are just illusions I start on them and I think that's an effect of optimism.

Do they have an impact on other people's lives?

I guess they do a bit. My technology is not that important, not like a television, which has revolutionised people's lives, but I notice that people when they see my animals look happy, so that's a good influence on the world.

The beasts represent life, more or less, and even children recognise what I'm doing. I think they understand what I do. It's so much fun to be an artist and work on these things. When you're young you zap from one hobby to another. I think now I have one thing and really want to explore all of it. Now I'm older I don't want to zap from one thing to another. As for my next project, I don't think there will be one. Death will be my next project [smiles]. E-mail to a friend