June 11, 2004

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Palo Alto Online

What comes next -- The fountain or the egg?

by Bill D'Agostino

Italian fountains are nice, modern artist Adriana Varella said, but they belong in Italy.

What Palo Alto needs instead in its most prominent downtown city square is a seven-foot tall egg-shaped sculpture made primarily from recycled computer parts, she said.

"This is the identity of Palo Alto," said Varella, the creator of the art piece, known as Digital DNA. "Here is the heart of Silicon Valley."

Last week, real estate developer Roxy Rapp, business mogul Chuck Hammers and former mayor Leland Levy announced they are in the beginning phases of a plan that would completely revamp University Avenue's Lytton Plaza. The result would be an Italian-style piazza, with a sunken fountain the new centerpiece of the .2-acre mall.

Half the money for the estimated $500,000 project would come from the private sector, half from the city -- although the City Council would ultimately need to approve the arrangement, since the aging square is city-owned.

An art-centered political brouhaha is now hatching, pitting the artist against Rapp, a developer with strong political connections, and Hammers, who owns the Pizza My Heart chain, which has a storefront off the plaza.

At a still-to-be-scheduled Palo Alto Public Art Commission meeting, Rapp will request that the installation of "Digital DNA" be delayed to let the fountain project go forward, according to Assistant City Manager Emily Harrison. That way, the sculpture would not need to be installed, removed and then re-installed if the fountain-centered plan gets the go-ahead.

Rapp, who shared conceptual drawings with the city's Public Works Department on June 7, insisted the two projects could coexist, with the egg-shaped piece inserted "in the landscaping."

But Varella doesn't think so. "I think it's impossible," she said, in her halted English. (She is originally from Brazil, although -- true to her political temperament -- she would only admit to being "from the world.")

"Palo Alto will never be Florence," Varella wrote in a rueful e-mail to a reporter. "Palo Alto doesn't want to become Florence. Palo Alto wants to become Palo Alto; The highest level of the consciousness of itself..."

It is the Public Art Commission that has the expertise to be the aesthetic eyes for the city, Varella argued.

The team of Varella and her partner-husband, Nilton Maltz, proposed "Digital DNA" to the Public Art Commission in 2001. The approval was unanimous, and it was agreed in 2002 that Lytton Plaza was the best site.

The sculpture, which Varella created with Maltz, is made of computer circuit boards quilted together in the shape of an egg. A steel frame covered in chain-like mesh holds together the multi-colored circuit boards. The sculpture is seven-feet high, and, at its widest point, 4.5 feet in diameter. The shape is inspired by the fact that Palo Alto is the birthplace of Silicon Valley, she said. It is a site-specific work, designed specifically for Lytton Plaza.

"It embodies the spirit and character of Silicon Valley," art commissioner Barbara Mortkowitz raved.

Words in a variety of languages, picked by the artists and others, are sewn into the circuit boards. All relate to the notion of interconnectedness, such as "Circuit of Power" (Varella's selection), and "Colonizing Circuits" and "Ideological Circuits." The languages include French, Japanese and Russian.

"It is a work that truly attempts to grapple with the technical and political reality of the valley," said Gerald Brett, another commissioner. "The statement there is that the technology generated by Silicon Valley has a far-reaching impact."

A contract with the artists was signed in 2003. The city granted them $9,950, a price Brett called "ridiculously inexpensive" due to Varella's international reputation. In Brazil, for instance, she did a multimedia installation in which video cameras were placed inside government offices, with the images displayed outside. The private doings of government were thus made public.

Brett, who has purchased some of Varella's photographs for his private art collection, said he would have voted to have the city pay as much as $30,000 for Digital DNA. "It's quite exquisite," he said, calling it "one of the most geographically relevant pieces that I've ever seen" as a commissioner.

In March, city officials gave the art piece the official go-ahead to be installed in the plaza.

"It seems that five minutes to midnight things will be changed for the worse," Varella wrote in her e-mail. "A beautiful but painful democratic procedure is now changed by an arbitrary decision."

Commissioners said they were unclear why the finished piece had not already been installed in the plaza, and many suspected it was due to the new idea for the fountain. Community Services Director Richard James insisted it was because the city has had a hard time finding a contractor who could install the large piece into its concrete base.

The proposed fountain would be similar to one in San Jose by the Fairmont Hotel, according to Rapp. The plaza would be shallow with pumps spouting water up from the ground. There might also be an oversized chessboard, with 1.5 to 2 foot-tall pieces. The public restroom currently in the plaza would likely be relocated.

"Digital DNA," meanwhile, is currently sitting in a San Francisco studio waiting to be brought to Palo Alto.

It's not the first obstacle the art sculpture has encountered.

Three years ago, Varella had finished sewing the various multi-lingual phrases onto the recycled circuit boards when she moved from her home in Palo Alto to San Francisco. During the move, she got permission from her then-landlord to store the pieces in the garage she shared with her neighbor.

But her neighbor threw away the unfinished artwork, thinking it was junk. Varella lost six months of work.

"It's funny how people don't understand about (contemporary) art sometimes," the artist said. "This is why we need public art."

Staff writer Bill D'Agostino can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com

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