Eddy Sykes’ Yakuza Lou is a site-specific installation that uses the relationship between the natural and mechanical notions of landscape to create a unique garden. The garden features pushing and folding topographic surfaces and a robot cloud that floats overhead which created a volume in constant pseudo-natural flux. A fusion of natural and man-made elements into a carefully thought-out practical application allowed viewers to re-evaluate advanced systems of design.

exhibition images

This multi-system consisted of a self-articulating, undulating landscape that utilizes hydrodynamics, motors, and growth patterns to constantly redefine a system of octagonal vegetative mats. Aided by a hinge-mounted motor, each octagonal palette expands and contracts much like an origami fortune-telling toy. The opened shape becomes a beautiful three-dimensional grass floret with a unique paint scheme partially inspired by World War 2 confusion camouflage. The landscape coexists with an artificial Cumulonimbus cloud, which hovers overhead and transforms over time.

Eddy Sykes is the principal of ChersonProm— a multidisciplinary 3D design firm that specializes in the development and manufacture of kinetic architectural systems. Mr. Sykes is a sculptor and architectural designer. His career has engaged him in a wide spectrum of esoteric engineering activities– ranging from kinetic architectural systems for high-speed rail in China, to consultation work on blast-rated doors, and his current endeavors in experimental architecture.

To accompany Yakuza Lou, Dorsey Dunn built a reactive, evolving sound field which was keyed to the movements of the “garden”.