"Once
upon a time" may seem like the beginning of a fairy tale, but the
truth is there are many locales around America, including Silicon
Valley, where people use these words on a regular basis to describe
what their town "used to be like." Silicon Valley has changed rapidly
over the last 50 years from the richest orchard-growing region in
America, to an industrial/military economy, to our present-day distinction
as the home of the "virtual e-conomy". Many who live here can attest
to the fact that what used to be sentimental reminiscences about the
area, have recently turned to desperate admonitions of a failure to
contain growth and stem the tidal wave of greed that plagued Silicon
Valley.
Harvesting
Profit enabled the Silicon Valley community to express their feelings
through an interactive web site which functioned as an upload mechanism
for commentary on the changes in Silicon Valley over the last 50 years.
Visitors commented on any or all of the following seven categories:
orchard stories, startup stories, land use issues, bring back, get
rid of, housing and congestion.
All comments
were collected and used in the multimedia portion of Harvesting
Profit. The physical part of this installation took the form of
a ghostlike abandoned orchard. Each tree had a small monitor which
displayed "video collages" of comments gathered from the web site,
portions of interviews I conducted with the last few remaining orchard
families in Santa Clara County, Global Community Foundation, and several
private citizens. One of the videos featured a history of the computer
industry focusing on groundwater contamination sites and another on
venture funding issues. The installation soundscape was a mixture
of voice recordings of all the written comments that came into the
site and the sounds of walking through the last remaining orchards
in Santa Clara County.
These five 50-year
old French Prune trees were taken from the Saratoga Heritage Orchard
in February 2001. All of these trees were slated for removal due to
disease/age and will be replaced with healthy new specimens. This
work is part of the Heritage Orchard Restoration Project recently
begun by the City of Saratoga. Were it not for the hard work of the
citizens of Saratoga who spoke out last year in an effort to save
the Heritage Orchard, this awe-inspiring living reminder of the past
would have been destroyed and replaced with a new soccer field.