Stephanie Smith: How did you get started with People Powered?

Kevin Kaempf: After leaving graduate school and moving to Chicago in 1999, I wanted to integrate a number of my interests. The process of making art for gallery exhibitions felt separate from my other interests in design, biking culture, and environmentalism, and I wanted to develop a set of parameters for an art practice that could integrate them. In particular, I wanted to use art and design as a format for communicating about environmental concerns and making change.

SS: In terms of design, were you interested in updating the aesthetic sensibility of environmental products and ideas?

KK: Definitely. For me it felt like many of the available environmental resources-like the books or Web site that offer information on researching composting or organic gardening- were completely related to the hippy granola aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s. While I have an interest in that aesthetic, I started thinking about updating it and about merging sustainable strategies like recycling, composting, and organic gardening with a contemporary consumer aesthetic. I'm not alone in thinking about this; other artists are working in this way, and it is a trend in the commercial world as well.

SS: That's one of the premises of People Powered: you've created a set of simple strategies or pilot programs for solving problems on a local level-in Soil Starter, gathering and composting kitchen waste for your neighbors; in Loop, collecting, blending, and redistributing leftover paint-and then you mimic slick corporate marketing tactics as a means to package and disseminate a set of practices that have a socially useful end. And you frame the whole thing as part of your art practice, which I want to get back to in a minute. First, though, as part of your preparation for People Powered you researched corporate branding strategies and logos. Which of the ideas or strategies that emerged from this research were particularly useful for you?

KK: As someone outside of the rhetoric of advertising, I was fascinated by marketers' ideas about community: by identifying the allegiances of the consumer, they foster an idea of brand loyalty that makes a connection with a product or a company into participation in a community, which still somehow is based on your own individuality.

SS: That's a common enough advertising technique: make individuals feel that a product affirms their unique identity and discerning taste but simultaneously links them to a group with which they want to be aligned. So, you were looking at this strategy more critically from your perspective as an artist and then appropriating it into the development of the People Powered brand.

KK: I especially wanted to infuse the visual language of corporate advertising with a notion of community that's based on something more meaningful than marketing strategies. Part of that developed from the crazy feeling that I was getting from seeing how so much "connection" happens through acts of consumption among people who are not our immediate friends and family. With the People Powered projects, I decided to take this on in a small-scale, grassroots way by building community within my own limits. Those limits include the physical limits of my neighborhood and also the limits of my personality, since I'd never really put myself in this kind of situation prior to this project. As the artist/designer of Soil Starter, for instance, I'm able to access friends and friends of friends and develop this small-scale composting network, which challenges me to put myself out there and also puts me into contact with people who may not initially have any interest in this as an art project.

SS: How do you talk about Soil Starter to the people who aren't interested in it as a work of art?

KK: I leave room for people to be engaged in whatever way they like. There are several different levels at which the piece functions: it recycles material, and it also functions metaphorically as a work of art that transforms materials, frames ideas, and makes a concrete gesture that models ways that others can develop creative solutions to the problems that they might passively hope someone else is going to take care of.

SS: Do you feel that your identification as an artist gives you latitude to pursue socially engaged projects in ways that you might not be able to if you were working directly as an activist?

KK: There's definitely something that happens when a visual artist works within another discipline as part of their process. We don't necessarily come up with the best solution to the problem that we're trying to frame, but on occasion we come up with something great because we're not so close to this other discipline.