Flying Crow Kinetic Sculpture

Sculptor of kinetic art and IFToMM member Volkert van der Wijk has developed a mechanism to make a 3D printed crow fly as realistically as possible. The sculpture which he made on the request of the Belgium artist Hans op de Beeck is currently on display in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (Belgium) until August 17 (website: https://kmska.be/en/hans-op-de-beeck-nocturnal-journey). Already more than 125.000 visitors have seen the sculpture, including the queen of Belgium

The flapping wing mechanism he designed is based on a crank that moves up and down in coordination with three of five vertical rods, which hold the crow’s body and wing segments. The dimensions of the parts for which the mechanism works and generates as realistic as possible impression of a real crow flying need to be so precise that he needed to develop a design method to obtain them. This method he will present and publish in a scientific article at the 8th International Workshop on Computational Kinematics (CK 2025) at the IIT Madras, India, from 25-28 November 2025 (website: https://ck2025.ammindia.org/).

You can read about the development of the sculpture on his website: https://kineticart.nl/en/collection_of_works/atelierblog/real_size_flying_crow

Website of Volkert van der Wijk: www.kineticart.nl

Link to video of the Crow: https://youtu.be/vLlS3ry7khk