SS: Do you tend to take responsibility for different parts of a project? Do you take turns with one person as the point person for each project? (I've been in most direct contact with Amy on this project so far, and I'm curious whether that's your preferred mode of working.)

FS: Depending on the origin of the project, different people become the contact. For instance, Nis received a grant from the Danish Art Foundation to bring Free Soil members Stijn, Joni, and Amy to Copenhagen for a week in 2004 to produce the Free Soil website and write proposals for other shows and festivals. In this case Nis was the contact. For Beyond Green Amy has been the contact person, mostly due to location and language. Ideally we try to work as a distributed brain, but this is not always the case.

SS: Are there other artists or thinkers who have been particularly influential for you, individually or collectively?

AF: A ceramics teacher, Joe Hawley, in undergraduate studies told me, "Art is a verb!" I have always held this close to my heart. Paolo Soleri and Miguel de Cervantes's Quixote share the same umbrella in terms of perseverance and fantasy. Recently I have been charmed by Tim Hunkin's Secret Life of Machines series. Others: Hans Haacke, Jacob Moreno, Rudolph Steiner, Stephen Willats.

NR: People working close to me have always been very important, from a distance a few would be: curator Mary Jane Jacob, artists Group Material, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Цyvind Fahlstrцm, and Bas Jan Ader, and the film Safe by Todd Haynes.

MM: Flatland by Edwin Abbott keeps reminding me that we can always zoom out into dimensions we didn't imagine possible and can have tremendous fun with that. Shigeru Miyamoto for creating these cunning worlds that people enjoy exploring. My childhood hero Heinz Sielmann, an old German fossil who made animal documentaries. Also the Interaction Design Institute Iyrea: in the last couple of years people decided to move from all over the world to a little town in the north of Italy, carrying along with them all kinds of personal skills and histories, all of them ready to experiment with this amorphous field "Interaction Design" in their own and joint ways.

SS: How do you see your work fitting into the current state of global art practice?

AF/NR: Maybe we can rephrase the question to ask why we choose to work under the umbrella of art rather than activism. We all agree that art remains more open than activism. We have found that much activism is bound by prescribed thoughts, dogma, and manifestoes. Art does not have to have one aim and that helps us avoid clichйd activist positions. This openness possibly allows for more mobility without constraints of "right" and "wrong." We share a common, growing concern about a world that is on the verge of an environmental, military, and economic crisis. We are compelled to engage with this reality.

MM: Recently we have observed that an interest in environmental awareness and sustainability has gained relevance not only in many art projects but also within business strategies, technology industries, and politics. This development is as exciting as it is curious. At the same time, I feel there is a danger in words like "sustainable" becoming popular buzzwords-they inevitably will lose their meaning as people grow tired of them. Artists' intentions may be doubted when they address such topics. It will be an interesting challenge to keep people on their toes.

SS: As I write, you're finalizing F.R.U.I.T., your project for Beyond Green. Please tell me about your current plans for the project.

AF/NR: Embedded in the food we consume are nutrients along with a cornucopia of information: historical and current political, cultural, and environmental data. When you purchase an orange from a local grocer for 50ў, you are purchasing more than what can fit in your hand. Free Soil has been interested in following oranges from shelf back to the farm. In this journey oranges pass through many hands before they reach the shelves. We chose to follow oranges because they are available year-round in all of the three cities where we reside. The physical properties of the orange were also of interest, in that it truly is the most communal fruit-oranges are very easy to share among a group. We aim to unearth information about the distribution of food into urban spaces and its effect on C02 emissions, economics, social relations, and the like. For Beyond Green, we will build a fruit stand that will serve as an information center. Instead of shopping for the fruit, people can "shop" for the information that is part of the fruit: the "fruit memory." We will produce a set of fruit wrappers printed with information, along with an interactive website.