Today on YouTube, I found an amazing set of videos of kinetic art sculptures made by the Dutch artist Theo Jansen.

It is really amazing to watch his creations as they walk across the beaches of Holland. There is something delightfully eerie about them. They look like living skeletons of some crazy sort of machine and yet there is something peacful about the way that the wander along, powered only by the wind.

As one who works with technology on a regular basis, I really like his quote that the only difference between art and technology is in our minds. Why can not technology be considered beautiful and expressive the way art is. And why must art be limited to the traditional forms that it has held for the last millenia or so?

Obviously in order be really ‘art’ it needs to go beyond simply ‘looking cool.’ This is where I think Theo’s work really stands out. While he is a bit crazy (he talks about them coming alive in an interview on GoodExperience.com), there is something to them that forces us to look deeper at our own biological existence. The movement of the creatures captures a beauty in our own movements that is difficult to simply describe and that by its commonplace nature we hardly ever recognize. In this way it also pushes the boundries of
art, by (as must kinetic sculpture does) a sense of movement in non-staticness into the art. Particularly, it makes the movement itself the art form rather than the thing that does the moving.