Standing at seven inches tall, these figures present a 2D-image “thickened” into a boxy 3D-figure. They are a bit bigger than FUNKO Pop! figures and feature a different overall aesthetic. The line up for FUNKO Vinyl Toys includes from DC Universe (Joker and Batman), Ad Icons (Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and Boo Berry), Gene Simmons of KISS, and The Simpsons (Homer and Krusty).

[FUNKO Vinyl Toys]

We are totally digging this Ninja of the month from Shawnimals! “We’re not sure what went to this ninja’s head first—the power or the cookies. Whatever it was, something transformed him into a criminal mastermind, determined to gain control of Ninjatown from the inside out. Thing is, who’s he really doing it for? Mr. Demon… or himself?”

[Mastermind Ninja]

Robo Strux “Brox” Robot, by Tomy. In 1986 Tomy continued the Zoid series with a grouping of smaller animated robots (in kit form) known to American kiddies as Robo Strux. These were nothing short of some of the best and most inventive examples of the toymaker’s art…intricately-detailed and well-built robot monsters that walked around once you finished assembly…if you followed the instructions!

[1986 Robo Strux "Brox" Dinosaur Robot]

There is no unequivocal definition of life. The best that scientists can come up with is a description of characteristics that objects observed to be “living” seem to have in common.

There is a list of activities or processes that “living things” do — like undergo metabolism, respond to stimuli, reproduce, etc. — but they seem to boil down to two characteristics: they tend to have some kind of signalling abilities, and they are self-sustaining, at least over a period of time.

How about viruses? Are they alive? They carry with them the code required for reproduction, but they can’t actually carry it out without help from outside. They have to take over another cell’s machinery in order to make more copies of themselves. They don’t seem to have much in the way of biological processes to sustain, and as for signalling abilities — they are a bundle of DNA or RNA code wrapped up inside a protein package; thus, rather than having the ability to signal, they seem to be the signal, themselves.

Dutch artist Theo Jansen doesn’t waste time or energy quibbling over the definitions. Focusing on the ability to interact with and move about their environment, Jansen has created a series of mobile sculptures that he insists on referring to as a new life form. Having created them, he sets them free to roam about his native Netherlands beaches. Accordingly, he calls them strandbeests — Dutch for “beach creatures.”

And “roam about” they do. To see one of Jansen’s strandbeests in action inevitably creates the impression of viewing a living thing. Powered by the wind, they stop and start, change direction, and move with an impression of inner purposefulness. Or at least the semblance of it. Even standing still, their vanes twitch and sway in the wind in a way that is not immediately attributable to the wind, itself.

Nor is their choice of direction. Though powered by the wind, strandbeests do not just move in any direction the wind blows. Jansen has built into them mechanisms by which they can sense and respond to obstacles. Encountering the water, a strandbeest changes direction and continues on its way. Jansen’s strandbeests respond and move about their environment so naturally, they inevitably beg the question, What is Life?

Conway's Game of Life: "Breeder" animation

The Game of Life

To John Conway, Life is a game. Or, more accurately, it is a cellular automaton, a computer program. Just as Jansen’s strandbeests derive their complicated behaviors from sets of simple structures, Conway’s Game of Life is driven by a simple set of rules. A very simple set, in fact:

1. Underpopulation: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.
2. Health: Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Overcrowding: Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies.
4. Reproduction: Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell.

The cells are represented as a gridwork of squares on a page. Colored-in squares are “live,” and cells the same color as the background are “dead.” To jump-start Conway’s world, the Player colors in some cells. This is the seed state. Then the rules are set in motion and the conditions of Life play out. The role of the Player in this Game of Life is to set the initial seed, then sit back and watch.

a Glider

One would expect this simple instruction set to result in a short and simple game. Instead, the watcher sees patterns emerge in the grid that appear to be behaviors. Some patterns, in fact, introduce the possibility of continuing the game indefinitely. One such pattern has been dubbed a “Glider,” for the way it propagates itself across the playing field. This pattern is so simple and iconic, it has been turned into an emblem of hacker culture.

Gosper's Glider Gun

When the game was young, Conway conjectured the possibility of an infinitely growing pattern, and offered a prize for the first person to come up with an example of one. Mathematician Bill Gosper, considered one of the cofounders of the hacker community, won the prize with the Glider Gun, a pattern that creates Gliders ad infinitum. There are other, bigger patterns, exhibiting even more complex behaviors, but the point is that they exhibit what can be described as “behavior” at all. By providing a computational basis for what has come to be known as “artificial life,” Conway and Gosper opened the doors for other pioneers. Like Theo Jansen.

According to biology, the basic building block of life is the cell. The basic building block of Jansen’s strandbeests is yellow plastic tubing of the type used in the construction industry for routing electrical cables. Using simple hand tools, Jansen combines sections of tubing with flexible sheeting, plastic hoses, recycled beverage bottles and other materials, to create mechanisms for movement. He chose these materials because they are readily available, inexpensive, easy to work with, and hold up well to conditions in the strandbeests’ environment, i.e., the beach. But he has created similar walking mechanisms from other materials, including wood and metal. Some of these constructions are large enough to carry passengers. Adhering to the Latin-based binomial nomenclature that taxonomists use, Jansen names his beasts according to genus and species. He calls one such transport device Animaris rhinoceros — “animaris” being a latinized shorthand for “animal of the sea.” And “rhinoceros” because… well, with its size, ponderous shape, and rough polyester skin, it looks like a rhinoceros. With people inside.

The mode of walking is what makes Jansen’s creatures so uncanny — not because they are strange, but because they move so naturally. We’re used to walking machines, metal spiders showing up at Burning Man, and the occasional dog-footed robot reports from the military. There’s a leg design called a Klann linkage that’s been around a while. Pretty standard for making walking mechanisms. But Jansen’s walking mechanism is something else again, which seems to follow its own graceful inner logic of movement. Animaris rhinoceros on the move, for example, looks not so much like a rhinoceros as like a chorus line of rhinoceroses boogalooing down Broadway in perfect sync. It houses no chips, no integrated circuits, no “brain” — just a deceptively simple feedback mechanism that has more in common with an old-time pendulum clock than with robots such as Honda’s state-of-the-art ASIMO. And therein lies both its elegance and its scalability. For “scalability” read not just size but adaptability. And for “adaptability,” read “future.” Jansen has a vision of the future for his strandbeests, and continually refines their design elements.

Animaris percipiere

Animaris percipiere uses the same basic walking mechanism as Rhinoceros, but it is clearly a step beyond, as the beauty (and complexity) of its internal structure testifies through its transparent skin. Percipiere is designed not as a mere transport mechanism. It is designed to be an autonomous entity. Or at least a step along the road to an autonomous entity. It sports a flexible wing along its back: a dorsal fin, if you will; and a row of recycled pop bottles. The bottles are connected by plastic tubing to simple pumps, not unlike bicycle pumps. The system serves Percipiere as a “digestive” system, the bottles being its “stomachs.” The wing, pushed by the wind, waves back and forth, driving the pumps. The pumps store pressurized air in the bottles. When sufficient pressure is reached… Animaris percipiere starts walking. The stored wind is routed into tubes that elongate under air pressure; these are Percipiere’s “muscles.” The muscles are connected by taps that can trigger other muscles in turn, like nerve ganglia (Jansen calls them “control centres”). Rather than simply being pushed by the wind, Percipiere “consumes” and stores the wind, and then uses it later, as needed. Which, taken together, is a pretty fair working description of what your “metabolism” does.

Why Life?

Jansen has come under criticism for his insistence on speaking of these mobile sculptures as “life forms.” He speaks thus of them because his ultimate aim, once they have reached a sufficient level of interaction with their environment — what biologists term irritability — is to turn them loose to fend for themselves.

Theo Jansen's Wind Lab

At his workshop on the dunes, Jansen continually refines his beasts. Once he’s learned everything he can from one design model, he declares it extinct and consigns it to his “boneyard,” where the sun and elements bleach the yellow plastic tubes, rendering them bonelike, indeed. Jansen has earned particular ire by claiming that his creations are refined by a process of evolution. Darwinians rightly point out that the whole point of evolutionary theory is that the driving mechanism is contained within the process, itself, and does not require an external hand guiding it — depends, in fact, on the absense of such a hand. These detractors fail to consider, however, that it is not this ongoing refinement of design that Jansen is necessarily referring to. Like evolution, Jansen is an eminently pragmatic experimentalist. In the early stages of his walking mechanism, rather than reiterate the painfully slow trial-and-error process of building and rebuilding a leg design, he did, in fact, employ a computer model that used a genetic algorithm, an accepted method for allowing a good design to refine itself over successive generations. Parameters for the design were allowed to perform inside the world of the computer model. More successful models were then allowed to “cross-pollinate,” eventually resulting in a design that would perform as desired in the real world. A genetic algorithm is, simply stated, evolution at work.

Jansen envisions an entire ecosystem of strandbeests of various shapes and sizes and levels of complexity, going about their day-to-day business, which business may be as incomprehensible to you and me as, well, your day-to-day business is to me, and vice versa. Will they eventually come to be able to reproduce themselves, as we do? It seems like a stretch — but in the meantime, it seems a bigger stretch for us humans to learn to avoid reproducing ourselves, willy-nilly. Will strandbeests come to exhibit other traits of “life”? Will they prey upon each other? It could be that the particular paradigm of predator and prey is simply the most expedient mechanism that evolution picked for carbon-based cellular life forms, but that it is not needed by Animaris of any stripe.

What we do know is that the definition of “living things” is as ever-changing as living things, themselves; it is continually revised as scholars encounter new entities. (Talk to a biologist about prions sometime.) We may come to realize, sooner rather than later, that the “definition” of life matters less than our attitude about it. One thing we can expect to see is unexpected (and perhaps even unpredictable) emergent behaviors, as strandbeests of new sizes and complexities proliferate.

Strandbeests of various sizes already exist. Small ones are even available as pets. You can buy a palm-sized strandbeest — Animaris ordis parvus (“Strandbeest of a small order”) — in plastic kit form, from Theo Jansen’s website. Assemble it. “Feed” it by blowing your breath upon its windvanes. Watch it move. And prepare to be enchanted.

High gloss fiberglass bust
Approx. w: 11” h: 20.5” d: 12.5 [28 x 51 x 31 cm]

Includes and a signed certificate of originality
and one family and friends application card*.

HK$ 4,388 [includes global shipping]

On sale at coarse hkg, October 14, 2010
11 pm Hong Kong time [05 pm Berlin, 11 am New York, 08 am Los Angeles]

This embodiment of noop captures the final moment in which his existence shines upon his face. Now you can experience the dramatic presence of noop in real-life, an extraordinary and once off coarse creation. Sculpted by Mark Landwehr.

Includes the gleaming noop in 1:1 splendour. This hand crafted piece is finished in high gloss and lined with a soft felt base. Safely shipped in styrofoam and protected in a 4-tone printed supreme cardboard box.

Shipping mid/late December 2010

[Coarse Eyes of Fear Bust Duo]

Ducobi presents 2010 First Edition of VINYL RB SERIES: New collectible 16cm Vinyl Toy Series: White Tiger & D.I.Y

[Ducobi 16cm Vinyl Toy Series: White Tiger & D.I.Y]

It’s no surprise that Shawnimals has come up with yet another awesomely cute plushie, this time in the form of the oh-so-delicious midwestern treat, the Chicago hot dog. This little guy spares no detail. You’ve got all the right toppings on a poppy seed bun. They’ve even mixed in a small amount celery salt with the stuffing to give it the correct aroma. Shawnimals will have a booth at the upcoming Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2), on April 16-18, where you can get your hands on these limited supply plush collectibles for $25.

[Shawnimals]
[C2E2]

On sale, as of February 3rd, Shawnimals is featuring this limited edition plushie as the Ninja of the Month, which is the second of twelve in the series. This 7 inch tall cutie is handmade and comes with a signed and numbered hang tag, a snowman sidekick named Rawr, character sticker and button. There’s only going to be 100 of these made, so get your hands on them quickly. Shawnimals also offers a Ninja of the Month subscription which allows you to get all the Ninja collectibles.

[Shawnimals]

The company Ducobi s composed of designers from Korea, Japan and the USA, creating high quality toys for true collectors. These toys are 100% hand made with inlaid Mother of pearl which incorporate traditional oriental craftsmanship combined with modern toy design.

Each design, standing 6 1/2 inches tall, is produced in a limited batch of 10 to 100. Currently, they only feature five different designs, but plan to create vinyl toys and apparel in the future.

[ducobi]

[Daft Punk Kubrick Set]