SS: Could you go into a little more detail on how you plan to present your findings?

FS: Information we have gathered will be presented through a Website and also through the wrappers, which we will give away in the museum. For the opening reception we will have fresh oranges wrapped in Free Soil wrappers as giveaways. These paper wrappers will be printed with information about urban farming and the transport patterns of fruit. F.R.U.I.T. wrappers will highlight the benefits of urban gardening: socializing, cutting down on CO2, putting the growing power in the hands of the people, building skills, sharing gardening secrets, neighborhood organization… many benefits can emerge from within the structure of an urban garden. One project we learned about during the research and that we draw inspiration from is the Food Conspiracy. The Food Conspiracy came out of the Black Panther movement. It was a network of neighborhood food-buying groups in the 1970s, based in the San Francisco Bay area, that bought organic food from rural farms and local distributors. The Conspiracy was large enough to purchase food at wholesale prices and pass the savings on to individual members. Many of the groups were run out of garages and living rooms and quickly grew beyond weekly, politically charged potlucks to an autonomous network of neighborhood grocery stores. An outcropping of the Food Conspiracy was the People's Common Operating Warehouse of San Francisco, a political project using food distribution as a form of community organizing and political education. The People's Warehouse was striving to build a "People's Food System," including a network of small community food stores throughout San Francisco.

SS: How do you see your work, and this project in particular, intersecting with sustainable design?

AF/NR: F.R.U.I.T. hopes to reveal things that are often hidden, so we can see how things actually work and then consider alternate ways of living and producing food. Most people are disconnected from the origins of their food, and this removal erases responsibility. On the level of the installation, we will use recyclable material where possible.

MM: Using digital technology is always problematic in terms of sustainability if we consider that producing even a microchip has a considerable environmental impact. At the same time, this technology allows us to reach people in different and often unexpected ways.

SS: How did you become interested in sustainability?

MM: In my childhood I approached environmental matters with the utmost sincerity. Founding the nature research team "Delkakaduphin" (a combination of the German words for cockatoo and dolphin) with my young friend Thomas, I was concerned with things like recording blackbirds singing, only to have them be drowned out by helicopters, which I saw as clear proof of humans invading nature. I think by now I've shifted to a much less activist approach.

AF: I grew up between my mother's organic farm and my father's commercial farm and pesticide company, and these conflicting practices fostered questions about how to maintain quality of life within a world slowly being depleted of resources. I was very influenced by my mother's holistic approach to growing food. My stepfather was a local activist and was very successful in the early 1980s, with the help of Mothers for Peace, at keeping oil platforms from being built along California's Central Coast. Seeing this sort of progress and action within a small community inspired me and built a sense of confidence that things can change.

NR: The Brundtland Report from 1987 was an important influence early on; this report tied sustainability to environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity. For me, making art that engaged in the environment resounded well with critiques of art institutions for not dealing with social and political issues.

SS: What do you see as the biggest challenges to developing and maintaining a sustainable art practice?

AF: I am not sure making "sustainable art" was initially a conscious effort. It has more to do with a way of life or a system of operation. It is important to approach projects from a holistic point of view, such that conceptually and formally the work becomes a sustainable system. Like concept of "sustainable systems" in the universe, the most challenging aspect of "sustainable art" is entropy.

NR: How art enters society and leaves it again is for me central to sustainability. Time transforms contemporary art into historic documents, so it is a question we constantly face, and on the material level I like artworks that can be recycled or at least have an idea of their own timeliness. I like how material questions connect us. If conceptual art held a critique of commodification, it was also in many ways a pure negation and left out bodily and sensual issues. Sustainability can help recover that sense of materiality, by heightening and complicating our awareness of how we live in, relate to, and interact with our surroundings.

SS: Could you talk about your design sensibility? It's sleek in some ways, but there's a real friendliness to the graphic style, and a do-it-yourself aesthetic to the objects and installations.

FS: We have a common interest in user-friendliness and accessibility. The design is not made to build a hierarchy, but to stay at eye level with the viewer or participant. It is a way of communicating. Creating a visual language in our projects is essential. In a way, it is a sort of domestication of the museum.

To quote Renny Pritikin on the damselfish of the Galapagos: "Each damselfish knows every pebble and leaf in its little corner of the tide pool and will remove any object that disturbs the perfection of their orderly homes. It is tempting to speculate whether these tiny beings see themselves as responsible for a little bit of order in a chaotic universe- i.e. are artists-or if they assume that the universe is perfect and they are responsible for keeping their little section consistent with the whole-i.e. are devout."