Palo Alto will remove a digital art installation featured in the City Hall for a decade due to maintenance issues, the Public Art Program Director announced Jan 15.
Digital art pieces are often expensive and face maintenance issues. The Commission was aware of this when they decided in a 2016 contract that digital art piece Conversation by Susan Narduli would be displayed for ten years. Just before the ten years finished in September 2025, they approved the initiation to evaluate the removal of the artwork. The Commission notified Narduli of this update in October.
Conversation was selected when the Palo Alto City Hall began a renovation project in 2014, which included plans for a digital media art display. Narduli’s proposal was accepted out of 107 applicants. In 2015, Narduli began community engagement, creating a detailed design, and in 2016, it was installed.
“Conversation was conceived as a media arts representation of democracy,” Narduli said. “When I first began working on it, I thought about the spontaneity and integrity of a person raising a hand in a public meeting. I imagined a visual representation of that meeting, with all issues up for public discussion, and then all that discussion, forming new, malleable shapes and patterns in real time.”
Americans for the Arts recognized Conversation as one of the top public artworks of 2016. Original commission of the installation cost over $174,000 and maintenance costs totaled to $20,644. Narduli understood that it was an ambitious art piece requiring a multi-platform interface.
“There was some maintenance, hardware replacement, kiosk redesign, website domain and cloud support, as we had to maintain all these various things that ran in the background,” Public Art Program Director Elise DeMarzo said. “City Council approves a dedicated maintenance budget for a collection, which you can imagine, we spend down to the nickel every year, and it does increase by a small percentage each year to accommodate for new projects coming into the collection.”
Issues with scaling and computers that struggle to connect to the art piece monitors are other maintenance issues. However, Narduli explained that this was to be expected. Technological art pieces have limited life expectancies when compared to more traditional art.
The commission plans to remove the computers powering Narduli’s digital art piece in February and March. They will then decide with Narduli what to do with the computer units. A clone of the working digital artwork is available on the collection website. The commission will not remove the monitors, as the monitors were there before the art piece installation.
DeMarzo explained that Conversation consists of three feeds of bubbles—purple bubbles that represent global news pulled from The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), blue that signifies national news taken from The New York Times and green that originates from the Palo Alto Weekly’s local news.
Round green bubbles with points at the bottom are comments people leave, while the fully round bubbles are pulled from Twitter feeds. The background of the piece includes images of Palo Alto. People can join the conversation, writing about current events, responding to news prompts on the screens or adding images. Remote individuals can participate as well, adding comments from their personal devices.
De Marzo said Narduli has been very understanding and collaborative about the deaccession of her artwork.
“Though it’s sad to see artwork go, I think it’s important that we all remember and feel what a success this was. It was up for ten years, right,” Commissioner Robin Mullery said. “And I think also with new media art that it was drawn from Twitter, you guys shifted to, you know, drawing from other sources that that means it’s topical and current. And if it’s outgrown that lifespan, you know, that’s what it was meant to do. So, I just appreciate that it does come to an end, and sometimes that’s a good thing.”
No plans presently exist to install a new art piece in place of Conversation. Narduli stated that her next projects will be focused on visual storytelling at an architectural scale.
“I hope that when people reflect on Conversation, they will remember that democracy is not a fixed idea. It is something we make together, and without participation, it doesn’t exist,” Narduli said.
