John Edmark: Dahlia Art Installation – Dubai
Private Commission
Engineered Artworks collaborated with John Edmark to design, engineer, fabricate and install his largest sculpture project to date. Edmark is an artist, designer, and educator at Stanford University. The Dahlias are a pair of illuminated, programmable and wall mounted sculptures installed within Heston Blumenthal’s Resonance Bar at Atlantis, The Royal Hotel in Dubai.
Much of Edmark’s work has explored the mathematical Fibonacci series of numbers that manifest in nature. Fibonacci math can be found in artichokes, pinecones, cacti, romanesco, and many flowers. The angular form of the golden ratio “phi” also manifests in nature and in these sculptures. The form is built by adding a progressively-smaller petal on a rotation of 137.5 degrees.
The sculptures at the Resonance Bar are each made up of over one thousand unique parts. No two petals are the same size. The large Dahlia has 135 unique metal petals and the smaller one has 124 metal petals.
The petals are made of aluminum and the light is from addressable LEDs in between each petal. There are no projectors or colored lightbulbs in the room. There are respectively more than 5000 and 7000 LEDs in the small and large sculptures.
The LEDs are used to artistically highlight the various spirals that manifest within the sculpture’s overarching geometry.