We have been working together in Chicago for the past five years. We came together in grad school at a point when we were both looking to get beyond the boundaries of our studios. We wondered how we could make art that would be relevant and interesting beyond the classroom or studio when we were not meaningfully interacting with the realities of our locality, the communities around us, or the issues that were of concern to people beyond the art world. We began investigating ways of creating work that could reach a broader audience and be more accessible than most of the conceptual work we saw being produced. Once we decided to collaborate, it changed our entire approach to making art. We had to let go of the notion of sole authorship, which inspired us to seek out new interactions and gave us confidence to go out and meet people with whom we might join forces. Working together was essential in spurring us to start asking others for their help and to pursue more ambitious projects than we could achieve alone.

We've become more interested in cultivating interactive, participatory, and educational experiences. We search for ways to initiate and show work in new contexts and environments, places where the work might not necessarily be seen as "Art" but where the audience for the work far exceeds the number of people that might see a piece hanging in a gallery. As Suzanne Lacy writes in Mapping the Terrain, "these expansive venues allow not only for a broader reach but ultimately a more integrated role for the artist in society."

Many of our projects have explored the notion of people-powered energy, which has led us over the past few years to the Noon Solar project. We started working on this project, initially titled Personal Power, around the time of the run-up to the current Iraq war. Feeling powerless in our country's decision-making process, we started talking about ways to bring power back to the individual. Because the war felt so driven by our country's greed for oil, we wondered if there was a way to use solar power on a scale that could enable each one of us to be independent from the electrical power grid.

After some initial investigation, we found a company that made flexible and lightweight solar panels. We realized that we could integrate these into garments and handbags to create mobile power units for handheld electronic devices such as cell phones. Our goal was to find a way to disconnect from conventional power sources and to still be connected to a larger network of information. With the help of local solar expert Vladimir Nekola, we created a few prototypes of different potential applications. It was our hope that by integrating solar power into items that people already used- like a handbag or backpack-they might become more interested in using solar power on a larger scale.

Realizing that this project could be useful in many areas of the world-particularly in countries where many communities not yet wired for electricity have access to cell phones-we decided to make it into a product, not just a conceptual project. We chose this route because we know that as a single piece of art or as a prototype it will have little or no effect on changing the current dependency on foreign and nonrenewable energy sources, whereas it might have some more measurable effect as a more widely available consumer product. For the past year and a half, we have been working with business students, engineers, and pattern designers to try to make this a reality. One thing that sets us apart as a business is that we came up with this idea in order to distribute new power sources, not to make money. Admittedly, this is an odd way to approach a business in a money-driven society, but we look forward to committing our ethics and values of sustainable growth into our business.

In our own practice, we have adopted various values and concepts from decades of artists working within frameworks of public art, environmental art, community based art, feminist art, and activist art. This includes thinking about materials and where they come from; whom the work is for; how to be socially responsible; the distribution of materials and information; how to provide solutions; and how to expand our audience. These ideals have also informed our approach to teaching.

We created a class for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called "Sustainable Forms." As teachers, we feel it is important to show students alternative options to the more traditional art structures of galleries and museums. We can encourage students to make their work accessible to a broad audience by being socially and locally relevant, politically engaged, and generous. We also promote the benefit of creating partnerships and exploring venues outside the traditional art system. We hope that these considerations can show students ways to sustain productive, meaningful practices over time. This independence provides freedom to think creatively and critically about their role as artists. We need to acknowledge that each year thousands of students are being trained as visual artists to eventually enter into a system that does not provide concrete jobs for them.

Perhaps one day, jobs for artists will be abundant if their roles are expanded and integrated into a new social structure that places a higher value on their creative work. William McDonough and Michael Braungart describe the ideal sustainable society in their book Cradle to Cradle (2002). They write that "every creature is involved in maintaining the entire system; all of them work in creative and ultimately effective ways for the success of the whole."2 This is the healthy social structure we strive for in our life, art practice, and pedagogy.