Meet Bart Jansen.

He’s 36. He hails from the Netherlands. He fits solar panels on roofs for a living. He has kids.

And in his spare time, he turns dead animals into exotic remote-control vehicles.

The response was huge. Jansen had recruited the help of technical engineer Arjen Beltman to design and help fly his 'half-cat, half-machine creation,' and it was covered everywhere from Mail Online to Forbes. Matt Rudge(GB)/Bart Jansen After that success, Jansen got more ambitious. In 2013, his next project was again using a taxidermy animal as its base -- but a far larger one. Jansen asked around local farms for a suitable animal, and one eventually got back to him with news of a recently deceased candidate: An ostrich. Bart Jansen 'Getting the shape done was the most difficult part,' Jansen told Wired. 'I looked at hundreds of pictures of live ostriches, dead ones, skinned ones to try and figure out what its body looked like. I had to then fit the skin around it and found that in some places I had too much foam and in others not enough. The skin then got a bit mildewy and I had to take it back to the taxidermist to treat it.' Matt Rudge (GB)/Bart Jansen Jansen and Beltman were at it again in 2014, giving a schoolboy's dead rat the Orville treatment. Matt Rudge (GB)/Bart Jansen Source. Jansen had another project in 2014 that saw less media attention than the others, but was no less impressive. He calls it the 'sharkjet,' and it's exactly what it sounds like. Matt Rudge (GB)/Bart Jansen Jansen managed to get his hands on a juvenile white tip reef shark from a local aquarium that had died of a bacterial infection, and the enterprising Dutchman strapped wings and a jet engine to the animal before sending it soaring through the air. Matt Rudge (GB)/Bart Jansen The skinned badger carcass has been sitting in his freezer for months. Bart Jansen This carcass has been used to build a mould for the engine, and Jansen is now considering forgoing plastination altogether, due to fears about shrinkage. Bart Jansen For the engine, Jansen and Beltman are building a jet propulsion system. ' the propeller sucks up the water through a grid in the belly of the badger, and excretes it with force through the back end, which is a servo controlled pipe that can direct the jet stream left and right, up and down,' Jansen tells me. Bart Jansen Because badgers are a protected species in the Netherlands, trying to develop a badger-skinned submarine is a more complex procedure than you might expect. You need to register at the police station, and authorities need to make sure that the badger wasn't killed deliberately, which would be an offence. Jansen won't be able to tour with the finished product either, as restrictions mean he'll be unlikely to be able to export it. Bart Jansen Jansen views his projects as art. He and Beltman are trying to 'invent a first machine for everything,' he told me in January. 'My work highlights situations that show the skewed balance between what we want to achieve and what we actually achieve, when pursuing that goal,' his website explains. Bart Jansen Jansen doesn't just work with *real* dead animals. Here's one of his installation pieces, focusing on children's character Big Bird. Bart Jansen In 2007, the Netherlands was debating the burkha, a garment worn by Islamic women. 'It was this blown up thing, for there were about 20 people in the whole bloody country wearing them,' he says -- so he decided to make a response. Bart Jansen 'On the whole political mishmash about it I decided to reinvent the Burkha for all kinds of occasions. So that prohibition would not be necessary any longer.' Bart Jansen 'Burkha for everyone so to speak. There are a couple more, one with a bold clowns head and a twin burkha…for twins, or 2 girls, or 2 boys even. Hand in hand under the hood… everybody happy.' Bart Jansen Here's another of his artworks -- 'The Last Dishes.' He collaborated with Lars Reinboud on it, and it won the Summer Expo public prize at Gemeente Museum Den Haag in The Hague. Bart Jansen/Lars Reinboud 'A cow could fit a person. So a cow is one of the options. That means we'd be using a cow indeed. Or any other animal we can lay our hands on that fits a person, but again, it's in a very early state of development, all still in our minds.' Wikimedia Commons There's been huge media attention, but it has yet to translate into a commercial success story. A €100,000 offer for the Orvillecopter in 2012 never materialised. He told Business Insider he would be 'happy to sell' the projects, but no one wants to buy them. Bart Jansen Another of Jansen's paintings.

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