THE COLOR OF PALO ALTO

INTRODUCTION
METHOD
PAINT COLOR
PIXEL COLOR
NATIONWIDE PAINTING
CITY HALL FAÇADE – CONCEPT
CITY HALL FAÇADE – METHOD
GREEN GARAGE
GARAGE INVENTORS
LUNAR MODULE
GPS TRACKING
PUBLIC SAFETY
HISTORICAL RECORD
CULTURAL EXCHANGE
AWARDS
ABOUT THE ARTIST
CONTACT
CALIFORNIA GIS CONFERENCE ABSTRACT
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
THANK YOUS
THE COLOR OF ROME
COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

“The Color of Palo Alto” is a temporary public art installation commissioned by the City of Palo Alto Public Art Commission for the Civic Center Plaza at 250 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, California, USA.

The Public Art Commission invited four different artists to temporarily place a sculpture in the plaza, and Samuel Yates is the fourth and final artist in the series.

Instead of placing a sculpture in the plaza that would sit inactive, Yates has placed a “portable solar garage” in the plaza as his “sculpture,” to be used as his office and headquarters during a twelve-month search for “The Color of Palo Alto.”

METHOD

The artist will begin his search for “The Color of Palo Alto” by photographing every parcel of land in Palo Alto with a digital camera, five days per week, Monday thru Friday. He will alternate between 68 and 69 photos per day. The photographs will be taken alphabetically from the “A” streets through the “Z” streets from January 3 to December 30, 2005.

Together with artist Eli Schleifer, who wrote a software program for the project that finds the average pixel color of each digital photograph, Yates will find the average color of each neighborhood, street, and parcel in Palo Alto.

In a democratic manner, each parcel in the city will contribute one “vote” of color toward the final color of Palo Alto.

The average color of all 17,860 photographs will then become a paint color, to be referred to as “The Color of Palo Alto.” There will also be average colors for each neighborhood, street, and parcel in the city.

PAINT COLOR

After the color is discovered, the bells-and-whistles version of the website, known as Version 1.0, will describe how to mix the various neighborhood, street, and parcel colors in different paint brands.

Any person will be able visit a hardware store, such as Palo Alto Hardware, and have any color from the project mixed as a paint color, especially the paint color “Palo Alto.”

The paint colors will have names like “Professorville,” “Whitman Street,” and “242 Melville Street,” depending upon whether they are the colors of a particular neighborhood, street, or parcel.

If someone painted their dining room wall “Melville Street,” for example, not only would the color reference the author Herman Melville, and his literary works such as “Moby Dick,” it would also reference the fact that every house on Melville Street had been photographed and averaged to define the color known as “Melville Street.”

The Version 1.0 website was engineered by artist Eli Schleifer and fully illustrated by artist Jen Corace. Schleifer will have a special section devoted to the software he developed for the project, including the strategy used to find the final color of Palo Alto.

PIXEL COLOR

Any of the average colors of Palo Alto will be made available for use in any software or word processing application. They can also be printed on any color printer.

For example, a student writing an essay on Walt Whitman might begin their work by changing their font color to “Whitman Street.”

NATIONWIDE PAINTING

After “The Color of Palo Alto” is discovered and made available online, any person will be able to use any of the colors to paint an object (such as a wall, a door, a bench, or a bicycle), take a photo of that painted object, and post that photo online.

The geographic location of these smaller paintings will be indicated by a dot on a map of the United States in Version 1.0 of the project website.

Together, each of these dots, which indicate the location of each of these smaller paintings by different people in different places, will represent individual brushstrokes on a continent-wide canvas, creating a giant-abstract-monochromatic-pointillist painting, to which anyone can contribute.

Furthermore, if someone travels to another state, or another country, we will encourage them to take a little “Palo Alto” paint with them to increase the breadth and depth of this large-scale painting.

To jumpstart this large-scale painting, one strategy may be to mail one can of “Palo Alto” paint and two disposable cameras to one elementary school art teacher in each of the 50 states. The art teacher could then put the paint can in the middle of the room and have students paint something with the color. The art teacher could then photograph all of the painted items with the disposable cameras and then mail the cameras back to the artist. The photographs of the artworks would then be posted on the Version 1.0 project website. Instantly, all 50 states would be represented on this larger canvas. Alternatively, local classes could establish sister classrooms in other states, with pen pal painters, to expand this larger artwork.

CITY HALL FAÇADE - CONCEPT

In the end, Yates would like to print out all 17,860 photos of Palo Alto and cover the entire City Hall façade with them, on a printed adhesive material, for six months.

If a passerby squinted their eyes they would, generally speaking, see “The Color of Palo Alto” on the façade.

The artist will set up a platform with a telescope and index for any passerby to find the photo of their house or business on the façade.

The photographs will be organized on the building alphabetically by street, beginning with “A” streets on the top left and ending with “Z” streets on the bottom right.

Because the photographs are being taken alphabetically by street, A to Z, during the year, the alphabetical order of streets on the facade will also be the chronological order of days in Palo Alto in the year 2005.

The first four columns of windows on the City Hall building will be Winter, the next four columns Spring, the next four columns Summer, and the next four columns Fall.

City Hall represents the City and the entire City would be represented on City Hall for anyone in the public to view their contribution to the final color.

CITY HALL FAÇADE - METHOD

The photos will be printed on a perforated adhesive vinyl commonly used to cover the sides and windows of buses with advertisements.

The material enables passengers inside a bus to see out the windows, while viewers outside the same bus see only the printed image on the outside of the windows (without seeing through the windows into the bus).

Roughly 1,116 photos would be printed on 3 ft. wide by 100 ft. tall removable strips on each window column on the City Hall façade.

The original $10,000 budget for the entire project, including photographing the city for one year, does not cover the cost of printing and installing the photographs on the façade.

To raise the funds to cover this cost, the artist will attempt to sell 300 empty paint cans with specially printed labels, as a limited edition sculpture, for $100 dollars each, over the course of 2005.

If you are interested in purchasing a paint can to support the covering of the façade with photos of every parcel in Palo Alto, or if you would like to contribute something else, such as services or expertise, please leave your business card or a note in the mailbox in front of the portable solar garage, or send an email to samuelyates@thecolorofpaloalto.com, and the artist will contact you.

GREEN GARAGE

The “portable solar garage” in the plaza was built from salvaged building materials and it uses renewable energy to power the equipment and electric vehicle used to find “The Color of Palo Alto.”

Specifically, the garage sends clean solar energy into the power grid during the daytime and it receives clean windmill energy from the power grid during the nighttime.

As a result, the electric meter on the garage runs backward during the daytime and forward during the nighttime, often eliminating energy bill charges.

In this way, the zero-emission electric scooter inside the garage is charged with zero-emission energy from the garage for Yates to travel around the city taking pictures every day.

As a result, when complete, “The Color of Palo Alto” can be emblematic of these sustainable methodologies as it promotes four city-sponsored environmental initiatives: Photovoltaic Partners, Palo Alto Green, Recycling, and Alternative Transportation.

That is to say, in the same way a pink ribbon is symbolic of breast cancer awareness, “The Color of Palo Alto” can be symbolic of environmental awareness as it actually uses these environmentally aware strategies to discover the color, expanding the “public” nature of the project.

GARAGE INVENTORS

The “portable solar garage” in the Civic Center Plaza celebrates Palo Alto’s history of “garage inventors” as the place where “The Color of Palo Alto” will be discovered.

Palo Alto is known as “The Birthplace of Silicon Valley” because of William Hewlett and David Packard. They were graduate students at Stanford University and founded their company in a one-car garage several blocks away from the present-day Plaza.

“The Color of Palo Alto” remains loyal to this hometown company by using all Hewlett-Packard computer equipment inside the “portable solar garage”, as well as an HP digital camera in the field as the lens through which the color is discovered.

The iconography of the “portable solar garage” in the Plaza relates to a story about Frederick Terman, a Stanford professor who encouraged his students to stay on the West coast and start companies rather than move back East to join established firms. Apparently, Hewlett and Packard followed his advice and hence began their company in Palo Alto.

When Terman would drive by the HP garage, if the car was parked outside the garage, in the driveway, that was a good sign because it meant business was cooking inside the garage. If the car was parked inside the garage, however, that was a bad sign because it meant business was slow.

A similar iconography has emerged with the “portable solar garage” in the Civic Center Plaza. If the electric scooter is seen out on the ramp in the Plaza, the artist is around City Hall or working inside the garage. If the scooter is gone, then the artist is out in the field taking photographs. And if the scooter is inside the garage, the artist has likely packed-up for the night.

In addition to these visual clues for visitors to the Plaza, the address numbers on the outside of the garage, above the roll-up door, are changed every night to reflect how many parcels in Palo Alto have been photographed to date. The exterior numbers enable visitors to casually track the progress of the project.

LUNAR MODULE

The “portable solar garage” was influenced by the Apollo 11 lunar module aesthetic. It attempts to highlight the structure as a portable laboratory that has landed in the plaza, unfurled its solar panels and outriggers, is conducting an experiment to find “The Color of Palo Alto,” and will then take off again.

The weather station on the starboard bow highlights the garage's role as a field station for this yearlong empirical study of the city.

The garage was designed to fold-up (solar wings down, outriggers and ramp up), so that the structure can be shipped by truck to a gallery in New York in 2006, and so that it can be disassembled to fit through any door.

GPS TRACKING

The artist will use a GPS unit, digital compass, and laser distance meter to track the location where each photo was taken, the direction the camera was pointing, and the distance to each building when the photo was taken.

In this way, each photo is accurately attached to its corresponding parcel in the city’s online database of parcels, known as the GIS (Geographic Information System).

The artist can precisely track each photograph to ensure that every parcel of land has been photographed and has therefore contributed one “vote” of color toward the final color of Palo Alto.

The GIS allows the digital photos to be used by city planners, fire and police personnel, and other city employees at the click of a mouse.

For example, when someone calls 911 in the future, the caller-ID will automatically retrieve a photo from the GIS of the parcel that is calling for help. In this way, the 911 operator may be able to understand the situation more fully and empathize with the caller more effectively.

The photographs may also reduce response times by helping safety personnel to find a location, strategize about a particular situation on the way to a scene, and see structural elements in a daytime photo that may not be visible at night or during a fire.

If the photographs can help reduce a response time by just a few seconds, it could have a profound impact on public safety, increasing the “public” nature of the project.

The 17,860 photographs of Palo Alto, which can fit on a single DVD, will become a historical document of the city in the year 2005 for the Palo Alto Historical Association.

A set of photographs of every parcel in Palo Alto from the year 1905 would be extremely useful to historians today. As a result of “The Color of Palo Alto,” that same type of historical resource for the year 2005 will now be available for historians 100 years from today.

Every photo of the city can fit on a single DVD that can be shipped to the five sister cities of Palo Alto in five foreign countries: France, Mexico, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the Philippines.

The City of Palo Alto can be shown as a video projection, one house after the next, as a cultural exchange that shares the whole of Palo Alto with its neighbors abroad.

“The Color of Palo Alto” received the “Best Art Project in the Bay Area” award from San Francisco Magazine in July 2004. The project also received the “Nice Modernist” award from Dwell Magazine for March 2005, in recognition of its larger social mission and effect.

Samuel Yates was born in Sacramento, CA in 1974. He received his BA in English from UC Berkeley in 1997, and his MFA in Visual Arts with Honors from Columbia University in 2002. He was a Joan Sovern Sculpture Award recipient, M Roche Scholarship recipient, and Department Fellow at Columbia. He was a SECA 2000 Award Finalist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In addition to private art collections, his artwork is included in public collections such as SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum, di Rosa Preserve (Napa, CA), and Ballett Frankfurt (Frankfurt, Germany). His 2001 sculpture, Untitled, was named by Guinness World Records as the “tallest file cabinet on earth,” and a short 30-minute documentary about his painting, “Vern,” in the SFMOMA permanent collection, premiered in October 2004 at the Mill Valley Film Festival. He has exhibited in America and Europe and his work has been written about in over 40 US and European publications. He has presented to gallery, museum, art school, university, private, and industry audiences, including most recently to the 2004 California GIS Conference.

“The Color of Palo Alto” is a public art project commissioned by the City of Palo Alto. It will travel to New York for exhibition in 2006.

Samuel Yates
The Color of Palo Alto
550 S. California Ave #320
Palo Alto, CA 94306
510-967-4017
samuelyates@thecolorofpaloalto.com

“The Color of Palo Alto”
Art Meets GIS

A fine artist combines GPS technology, a digital compass, a laser distance meter, a digital camera, and GIS software in an Art Commission-sponsored project to photograph and geocode each of the city's 20,000 structures. The artist seeks to find the average pixel color of the city and hence “The Color of Palo Alto,” to be used as a paint color and font color afterward.

See his one-of-a-kind equipment rig; preview a website that tracks the artist's daily progress along each street; and hear about the technical challenges and benefits of integrating these photos and diverse data sources into the City of Palo Alto GIS.

With several high profile and critically acclaimed projects already to his credit, Samuel Yates won a competitive grant to embark on a unique and technically challenging project combining art and GIS technology.

Yates uses a GPS unit to gather an initial position, a digital compass to record his orientation, a laser meter to measure the distance to his target, and a digital camera to record the visual image. Several hundred data points are gathered in an average day. Back in the office, the GPS data is post-processed with base station satellite data to achieve sub-meter spatial accuracy. Queries combine data records from the laser meter, camera and differentially-corrected GPS into a single relational database table of camera positions. Software algorithms calculate the target position inside of each property parcel, and, from each photo, the average color of the parcel. Each day produces a thematic map showing the average color of the photographed property parcels.

Ultimately, Yates will calculate the average color for the entire city and make the paint color “Palo Alto” available to be mixed at any hardware store (and the pixel color available to be printed from any computer). The website will display artifacts from around the world utilizing the paint and ink color.

The Palo Alto GIS will benefit by having a photo of every structure available at the click of a mouse. The methodology and equipment setup can be applied to developing an inventory of a wide variety of other city assets.

[The artist has built a “portable solar garage” in the Civic Center Plaza to use as his office and headquarters. The solar garage charges the field equipment and electric scooter he uses to travel around the city each day. The solar garage also celebrates Palo Alto’s history of garage inventors while promoting four of the City's environmental initiatives: Photovoltaic Partners; Palo Alto Green; Recycling; and Alternative Transportation.]

Q: Won't the color be grey or brown?

A: Maybe. We'll see in the final math. The dominant colors in the city are blue for sky, green for trees and grass, brown for limbs and trunks, and grey for sidewalks and driveways. We'll hope that blue and green remain the dominant colors because when you average blue and green you get blue-green, not grey or brown. We'll have to wait and see.

Q: How do you find the average color?

A: Eli Schleifer will explain it better in Version 1.0 of the website, but basically every pixel in a JPEG has a red, green, and blue value on a scale from 0 to 255. Schleifer adds up all the red values of all the pixels in the JPEG and divides by the number of pixels to get the average red value of the entire JPEG. He then repeats the process for the green and blue pixels so that you have the average red, green, and blue values of the JPEG. It's straight math. The mean average.

As proof of concept, Schleifer took the average color of each horizontal row of pixels in a JPEG and found its average color. Then he changed that entire row of pixels into its average color. Sure enough, there was a bluish blur where the sky was, a greenish blur where the trees were, a pinkish blur where the house was, and a greyish blur where the sidewalk and street were.

Q: How can we track your progress?

A: If you are near the Civic Center Plaza, I change the address numbers above the roll-up door on the portable solar garage to reflect the current number of parcels photographed. My progress is then tracked as the numbers advance above the door.

Alternatively, we'll try to develop an update method in Version 1.0 of the website.

Q: Why did you pick Palo Alto?

A: I was invited by the former Chair of the Public Art Commission, David Levin, at an opening of mine at the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, CA, to make a proposal for the temporary installation series in the Civic Center Plaza. The Commission accepted my initial proposal in November 2001, and then my final proposal for “The Color of Palo Alto” in February 2002. I was still in graduate school at Columbia University in New York at the time. A few months later, after I graduated with my MFA, I came out to California to complete the project.

Q: What was the timeframe of the project?

A: The basic timeframe is described below:

FIRST SIX MONTHS (CITY): When I first arrived in Palo Alto, City of Palo Alto staff asked me to wait six months before beginning the project.

SECOND SIX MONTHS (ARTIST): When we began the procedure for installing the “portable solar garage” in the plaza, the sculpture required architectural, engineering, and electrical diagrams to obtain the various permits. Without a budget, this process took time. It was only through the generosity of local residents and businesses that I was able to submit my permit applications. The architectural consultant (Joseph Bellomo Architects, Palo Alto), engineering consultant (Sierra Engineering Group, Union City), and photovoltaic consultant (SOLectric Electric, Palo Alto) were the people who made this happen.

THIRD SIX MONTHS (CITY): The City then required six months to review and approve the applications.

FOURTH SIX MONTHS (ARTIST): After receiving my permits, it took six months to build and install the sculpture in the Plaza. It was only because the metal fabricator (John Romanoff Welding, Redwood City) let me work alongside him at his shop that we were able to finish the “portable solar garage” on this budget. My tools were still in storage in New York and the budget did not allow me to rent a work space. I finished building the garage on-site in the Plaza and then installed explanatory texts in the plaza to explain the project to visitors.

Given the amount of time involved to-date, and how close we were to January 1, we decided to set the start date on January 3, the first Monday of 2005, to enable me to capture the various seasons of Palo Alto, and their corresponding colors, from January 3 through December 30 of 2005. In the meantime, we spent the three months prior to the start-date revising the GIS software and protocols (since the GIS procedure and parcel maps had changed since the original installation).

Q: How was this project possible on such a small budget?

A: There has been volunteer support from hundreds of residents and staff, including the donation of materials, software, hardware, services, lodging, and office space from many local and regional businesses. It has turned into an expanded grassroots effort and the project would have been impossible without their help. I have begun acknowledging these supporters in the “thank you” list below. The list will be properly expanded at a later date.

Q: Are you going to find the color of other cities?

A: This is a one-of-a-kind project. However, I did entertain the notion of a “Smallest Town, USA” project, i.e. to travel to all 50 states and photograph the smallest town in each state as an anthropological study of vanishing American frontiers.

According to Census 2000, three states have only one person in their smallest town: New Amsterdam in Indiana; Hibberts Gore in Maine, and Irvings Location in New Hampshire. Ironically, our smallest state, Rhode Island, has the most people in its smallest town of New Shoreham, with a population of 1,010.

Q: Are you selling these “portable solar garages”?

A: I do not have plans to mass-manufacture these garages, but this particular “portable solar garage#148; – the garage in which “The Color of Palo Alto” will be discovered--will eventually be for sale in a New York art gallery.

I would be happy to answer any questions or talk to anyone about the structure. A military contractor contacted me to talk about how they could use such a “portable solar garage” for desert testing. That is, how they could use the “portable solar garage” to run two computers with two people inside it in the middle of nowhere. The structure is an air-shippable, drop-down laboratory of sorts. Others have suggested the garage's potential for foreign aid work.

Q: What kind of electric scooter is that? How far can it go on a charge? And where can I get one?

A: The electric scooter is made by Oxygen SpA, an Italian company with an outpost in New York (www.cargoscooters.com). I got my scooter from a distributor in Oakland, California called electricmotorsport.com. I believe the scooters normally cost about $1,500. I've been able to get 32 miles on a single charge. So far I average between 40 and 150 miles per week on it.

Aside from driving a zero-emission vehicle using zero-emission solar energy, the best part of the Oxygen is that it is a moped class vehicle, which means that you only need to register it once in California and it's good for life. I think it cost me $11.00 to register it at DMV, and then it cost $7.00 to add it to my car insurance policy. Basically, you're good to go for $20 bucks.

Q: When will you be in my neighborhood?

A: I'm taking the photos alphabetically by street. I started the “B” streets during the third week of photography. If you figure out what place in the alphabet the first letter of your street holds, you can probably multiply by two (weeks) to get the general time frame.

For example, Kipling Street begins with “K.” “K” is the 11th letter of the alphabet. 11 times 2 weeks is 22 weeks, which puts “K” streets sometime in May, or 22 weeks into the year.

I'll try to figure out a better way to keep you updated on Version 1.0 of the website. It's hard to spend time on that stuff in the midst of taking pictures every day. No staff.

Q: How long will it take to photograph all 17,860 parcels?

A: The project is designed to last one full year. I take 69 photos on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; 68 photos on Tuesday and Thursday; and 69 photos for one week straight the first solid week of each month. That comes out to 17,860 parcels by the end of the year so that we have even data samplings for the entire year. That way, we can find subsets of “The Color of Palo Alto,” such as Palo Alto in Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, or March, June, September, December, etc.

Q: How do you decide where to photograph a parcel?

A: I photograph every public-facing side of every “property parcel” from across the street. I try to center myself by using the roof outlines on my maps as a guide. I do not always take the most photogenic shot of a house. For example, if a house is on the right of a parcel, and a large yard is on the left, I will photograph from the center of the parcel. I might only get part of the yard, or part of the house.

Another example is that if there is a bush in the way, and if I moved over 10 feet it would not be in the way, I still take the photo from the center of the parcel with the bush still in the way. I always try to take the photo from the center of the parcel, despite it being a worse photo. This way, there is a system with rules for me to follow, and I also get some incredibly random, and perhaps more interesting, shots. I would not get many of these shots if I was simply trying to photograph the house in the most photogenic manner.

Q: What is a “property parcel?”

A: In the GIS, a “property parcel” is a unique piece of land on top of which there can be many “parcels,” or pieces of real property. For example, each unit of a condominium is technically its own “parcel.” So, there can be many condominium “parcels” stacked on top of the actual piece of land. The piece of land is called the “property parcel,” while the condominiums stacked on top are just “parcels.” I photograph each side of each “property parcel,” so one photograph could potentially be used to cover many “parcels” stacked on top of one “property parcel.” For the purposes of the rest of this document, the term “parcel” really means “property parcel,” or each unique piece of land, not the “parcels” stacked on top of them.

To illustrate more clearly, if there are 20 condominiums on a single corner lot, I photograph one side of the lot and the other side of the lot. I do not photograph all 20 condominiums individually.

Q: How do you decide which side of a corner parcel to photograph?

A: If a parcel is on a corner, such as the corner of Alma Street and Addison Avenue, I photograph both the Alma Street side and the Addison Avenue side of the parcel. Both photographs are then averaged to get the one color of that parcel. However, when computing the color of Alma Street, I would use just the average of the Alma Street picture to compute Alma Street, and when computing the color of Addison Street, I would use just the average of the Addison Street picture to compute Addison Street. Then, when computing the color of the neighborhood, I would use the average of both the Addison Street and the Alma Street pictures to be the one “vote” of color that contributes to the final color of the neighborhood, and then to the final color of Palo Alto.

It is Eli Schleifer's software that will perform all this magic, and he'll explain it in Version 1.0 of the website.

Q: I understand that Palo Alto spends less than 1 dollar per person on public art each year. How much did your project cost the City?

A: “The Color of Palo Alto” cost each resident 17 cents, assuming that there are 58,598 residents in Palo Alto.

In return, each resident gets: 1) the average color of their parcel, street, neighborhood, and city; 2) a database to help city staff, especially city planners, to respond to requests and to maintain the city; 3) a database to help Police and Fire respond to 911 calls, perhaps even saving lives by shaving seconds off response times; 4) a historical record of Palo Alto for future generations; 5) an educational opportunity to promote four of the City's environmental initiatives; 5) a public artwork; etc.

Q: How does your beard fit into the project?

A: I shaved my head and beard the first day, and I will let them grow until I find “The Color of Palo Alto.” I meet many people in the plaza, and I thought the beard would be a nice way to mark time after someone meets me. My physical appearance will then be a visual reminder of how much time has passed since they last stopped by, and how much time it is taking to find “The Color of Palo Alto.” The Rip Van Winkle effect.

Q: How did this public safety benefit emerge?

A: In 2001, when I came up with the idea to find “The Color of Palo Alto,” I knew that I was going to be taking photos of every parcel in the city. I cold-called around City Hall from New York to see if anyone could find a use for the photos and, if so, how I should organize them to be most useful. The Real Estate department passed on the idea, and then I landed on Gloria Humble, a Senior Planner in the Planning Department. She explained that the City had a database of parcels called the GIS (Geographic Information System). It could be extremely useful to the City of Palo Alto to have a photograph of each parcel attached to its corresponding parcel in the GIS. However, she said that my handwritten notes would not have a very high quality control, so I should probably use a GPS with a digital compass to record where I was and which direction my camera was pointing. Thus, the GIS component of the project was born. The implications and uses for the data, such as public safety, began to emerge only after city staff learned that there would be a photo of every parcel.

The sense of public benefit is similar to the ethic of free data from the human genome project. The data, when made available, allows greater and unexpected outcomes to occur.

Q: Has anyone photographed an entire city before?

A: The entire city of Paris, France was photographed for their online Yellow Pages at least five years ago. The photos pop-up when you enter an address or telephone number, and you can navigate through the photos down the streets (for an example, visit “photos.mappy.com,” click on “Paris,” and then double-click somewhere near the center of Paris to begin seeing photos). Recently, many years later, in January 2005, a local US company, founded in October 2003 (coincidentally in Palo Alto), replicated this French Yellow Page search model for American cities.

In general, as far back as 1911 photographers began making tourist books of every building on a given street, such as “Fifth Avenue New York from Start to Finish” by Burton Welles, and “Both Sides of Broadway” by Rudolph DeLeeuw. Fifty years later, Ed Ruscha reinvented the genre, with a contemporary art ethos, in his “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” in 1966. Also, all of New York has been photographed relatively recently by an artist, and at least one company has had online photos of Manhattan Island for several years.

“The Color of Palo Alto” is about gathering color. It is not about taking photographs or efficiently capturing images for a business model. Indeed, there are probably few things less efficient than taking photos of the entire city, over an entire year, alphabetically by street, to capture the shades of the seasons.

“The Color of Palo Alto” is a fully-articulated “public art” project: part sculpture, part performance, part painting, part environmental art, part political art, part earthwork, etc.

Q: Do other cities have such an extensive database of photos for use by city staff and safety personnel?

A: In the past three years, since “The Color of Palo Alto” began, several companies have emerged to offer the service of photographing an entire city. However, it is still relatively expensive and department heads have a hard time justifying the expense for this not-yet-standard-practice. Because the City of Palo Alto will be getting a license for the dataset from “The Color of Palo Alto” so cheaply, as a byproduct of a public art project, the initial cost hurdle is avoided and staff can instead focus on how to use the photos.

The low cost to the City was made possible through the generous donations of regional businesses over many months of coordination. For the data gathering side of the project, special thanks to PNI Corporation, Santa Rosa for the digital compass; Trimble Navigation Limited, San Jose, for the GPS unit; Davis Instruments, San Leandro, for the weather station; Geodesy, San Francisco, for the GIS software; Kelly Fergusson, PhD for the GIS & GPS consultation; electricmotorsport.com for the electric scooter; Crystal Dynamics, Menlo Park, for the hardware upgrades; Washington Mutual, Palo Alto, for data storage space; and Levin Law Firm for initial office space and HP computer equipment.

“The Color of Palo Alto” would not have been possible without the generosity, goodwill, wisdom, and support of the following:

PORTABLE SOLAR GARAGE

DATA

INFRASTRUCTURE

ART

A more comprehensive list and description of these supporters and their contributions will be forthcoming. In the meantime, please send corrections to samuelyates@thecolorofpaloalto.com and the artist will apologize profusely for any errors or omissions. Thank you!

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2001–2006 Samuel Yates. “The Color of Palo Alto” is a trademark of Samuel Yates.