Beach Creatures

[Narrator] My name is Ian Frazier,

and I've written a piece about

Theo Jansen who is a Dutch artist

who makes creatures that walk,

kinetic sculptures,

which he calls Strandbeest.

Another ten steps,

one, two, three.

[Ian] Strandbeest in Dutch means beach animal.

Theo has worked in a number of different forms,

but in 1990,

he began making sculptures out of PVC pipe,

plastic pipe.

Sculptures whose purpose was

to walk on the beach and throw sand up onto the Dutch dunes,

in order to help preserve them from the rising sea.

This is a project that he's worked on

exclusively since then, for 21 years.

He is a Dutch artist,

that's a very strong tradition that all visual artists

has to work with and against sometimes.

They always photographed on the beach,

and the photographs always use the clouds in the sky,

and the north sea.

And so he's in the tradition, I think,

of Dutch landscape

in a kind of complicated modern way.

He manages to make things that look so close to being alive

that you almost can believe they are.

It's just like witchcraft.