Stephanie Smith: You've only been working together as Free Soil for a year. Please tell me a bit about each of your backgrounds, why you decided to form this new artists' group, and what you each bring to the collaboration.

Free Soil: Free Soil sprouted during a workshop in Lofoten, Norway, which focused on media in relation to site. Four of us (Amy Franceschini, Nis Rшmer, Stijn Sciffeleers, and Joni Taylor) came together during this workshop and found that even though we were working in geographically distant places, we shared references and were all interested in the environment and in participatory art forms. We found there that we all had aligned interests in the economic, social, and political organization of space. We wanted to make a milieu for exchange and learning together, so to facilitate this for ourselves we made the Web site www.free-soil.org, which is also a public resource. We formed this umbrella group with a hope that we would continue the discussion we had started in Norway. Our interests really stem from wanting to learn and propose alternative methods of research, collaboration, and learning.

Free Soil has grown to include other members. Three of us are working on the project for Beyond Green: Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator dealing with notions of community, sustainable environments, and a perceived conflict between humans and nature. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 and continues to maintain a balance between art and design. Currently she is teaching art at Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute. Myriel Milicevic is from Germany and has just completed a masters degree in Interaction Design, a new field that concentrates on human involvement when designing for telecommunication technologies, interactive products, and services. She has combined mobile game playing with sensing technologies so that everyday people can explore their environments in a fun and informative way. Nis Rшmer comes from Denmark and works with public art in the city, on the Web, and in the news media. He studied urban planning at The Berlage Institute (Netherlands) and has a special interest in the social and political organization of space and in how processes of globalization affect the city and our natural environment.

SS: What do you each find most interesting or satisfying about working as part of this collective?

Nis Rшmer: Apart from being able to share resources, being a part of a community allows you to test your ideas, which is useful when working in the social sphere.

Amy Franceschini: I like to think of Free Soil as a mother ship: a free-floating and opensource system of activities and resources that lands on occasion. We all have an interest in sharing our resources and collectively questioning the social and political landscape that surrounds us. At this point, we try to stay as open as possible

Myriel Milicevic: Looking simultaneously at the same issues from remote places is quite interesting-we can compare patterns and behaviors between different locations, and often their conditions are linked to one another.

SS: You live in three different countries and only occasionally get to work together faceto- face-that's one of the reasons we're doing this interview by email. I'm curious about how that shapes the dynamics of your creative process

FS: Since Norway, we have collectively met in person twice. Once Nis hosted us in Copenhagen, and another time Amy hosted in San Francisco. We have found that when three out of the four persons are away from their home and everyday distractions, we can really focus on projects at hand. It also gives a chance for the host to see his or her city with new eyes. Since we met on neutral ground (in Norway), we have tossed the idea around that maybe we should meet like this more often-experiencing a new place together-like a condensed workshop situation. When we are not together, aligning time zones can be tricky, but we all try to work around this and so far it has not been prohibitive.