From the TED talks

"Since about ten years Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been busy creating a new nature with plastic tubes, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, and tape as the basic material for creatures which are able to walk feeding only on wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives in the wild, multiplying and striving for survival.

Artist, technician, inventor and you might also say poet, his walking sculptures look alive as they move and are able of basic reactions to their environment thanks to antennas, legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubes), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (primitive logic gates) that can for example be used to reverse the machine’s direction if it senses dangerous water, or loose sand where it might get stuck. By applying the principles of evolution to the world of machines through breeding of the most successful species, and using algorithms on a computer he managed to take the best bits from each to make them better generation after generation."

This guy is a biomechanics genius. How a single man can achieve that alone with such limited resources blows my mind. It's not only the technical realization of his sculptures that is amazing - he has a true vision of creating new lifeforms. All of this without a single piece of electronics. Makes you wonder what he could do given a solid budget and access to state-of-the-art technologies. In this digital age who'd think that the first artificial lifeforms would be analog?

You can find more information on his website and on Wikipedia.

Also see this amazing solar powered kinetic paper creature by James G Watt.