SS: This fall, you're going to be in residence here at the University of Chicago teaching a course on environmental activism and contemporary art that's going to be an almost entirely mobile, field trip-oriented class. Could you talk about that course and the relationship between your art and your interest in radical pedagogy?

NN: The course is based loosely on an idea the anarchists Colin Ward and Anthony Fyson formulated in the 1970s, in which all the classes occurred outside in the city. Their idea was to enable high school kids to start thinking about and even possibly implementing urban planning ideas themselves, in an anarchistic, do-it-yourself style. In Chicago we have ten weeks and ten trips in and around the city, visiting different alternative ecologies: economic, environmental, and communal experiments. Artists are now inescapably inscribed within urban regeneration strategies, and in order to start thinking about this bind critically we need to begin creating more disruptive and experimental methodologies, not just "neo-situationist spectacles," which is how I see a lot of artist interventions developing. It is also an attempt to imagine the city as a multitude of ecologies and alternatives.

SS: How important is your art training to the work you do now? You mentioned once that you were part of a transitional generation in art school, so you had conceptual training and also learned how to draw.

NN: My education at St. Martins College of Art and Design, in Soho in central London, was interesting (1986-89). Our generation was on the cusp of change, from a more traditional formal art education to what we have now, a more interdisciplinary pedagogy. At St. Martins it would have been better if the institution were given over to the students for three years; it was the location and the other art and fashion students that made the school interesting. I left for Cologne the summer I graduated, and I learned more there about site-specificity, politically engaged practice, and the use of irony as a discursive and critical tool in art making.

On a general note, my practice as an artist is informed by ecological models and ideas, but this is only one small part of my practice-I don't regard myself as an "ecoartist" in any way. I am focused on issues that are threaded through public space and urban regeneration. Ecological issues are one thread or one ecology amongst many.