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Martin Rees asks: Is this our final century?

Martin Rees asks: Is this our final century?

Creatures on the beach: Theo Jansen on TED Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen shares the story of his “Strandbeests,” eerily lifelike kinetic sculptures that he has built from plastic tubes, old lemonade bottles and plastic ties. He hopes that these artificial life forms, as he calls them, will one day survive on their own, crawling the beaches of Holland. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Watch Theo Jansen’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances. Read more about Theo Jansen on TED.com. NEW: Read the transcript >> I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago, and it’s about making new forms of life, and these are made of this kind of tube: (points to construction of conduit tubing) electricity tube, we call it in Holland, and we can start a film about that and we can see a little bit backwards in time. (Film begins of Jansen moving a creature’s frame onto a beach, creature moves limbs as it is moved, as if it is walking.)

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