Theo Jansen creates giant, wind-powered creatures.
Theo Jansen is an amazing scientist-turned-artist who creates "kinetic sculptures" of large, wind-powered multi-legged machines that are designed to move and exist autonomously on their own. The man and his work were featured recently in an ad for BMW and you can see more of it on his official web site, Strandbeest. Wired Magazine ran a really good article about his work a few years ago too.
While I don't think that these moving sculptures are puppets (I'm inclined to classify them as giant Automata-like mechanical devices) there are all sorts of ways that things like this could be incorporated in to puppetry or exist along side it in a show. What about giant parade puppets with working parts that were powered by wind? Or some kind of outdoor puppet show that takes place in a moving, wind-powered puppet stage? I wonder how could they be utilized in film or video?
Special thanks to Greg for turning me on to the BMW commercial I linked to above!
