Amy Franceschini

Amy Franceschini's art practice questions and challenges social, cultural and environmental systems through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices manifested ""on"" and ""offline"" in the form of dynamic websites, installations, open-access laboratories, and educational platforms that encourage new formats for engagement and production. Often taking form as long-term engagements with the public, Amy's projects interrogate the politics of space and ways that globalization affects the natural and built environment. The images of growth pervading her work invoke an appreciation for finite resources and function as a metaphor to value and nurture our own creative resources.

In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists whose work used new media tools to foster sociability on the internet and through interactive installations. Futurefarmers hosts an artist in residency program that offers a platform for collaboration and research. The program has hosted over 18 artists from 10 countries and forms the basis of a distributed network of artists with whom they continue to collaborate. Futurefarmers have exhibited internationally and received numerous awards; Ars Electronica Golden Nica, 2002, Webby Award, 1998 and 1999, and Transmediale New Media Award, 2003. Futurefarmers' They Rule was included in the The Whitney Biennale, 2002. In 2002, they released a monograph: Futurefarmers: Harvest: 7 Years of Cultivation published by Idn, Hong Kong.

In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners. Free- Soil is predominately a public website that serves as a repository of links and information shared between 4 geographically separated artists. The content includes reviews of exhibitions, public projects, links to artists and resources that propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental currents in which we live. Free Soil has exhibited internationally and created a number of commissioned works for temporary public art projects, workshops and festivals. They have received funding from the Danish Arts Council in 2004 and 2006 and Zero One, San Jose in 2006.

Amy considers teaching as an extension of her practice and built in feedback mechanism. Since 2002, she has engaged in learning and teaching through workshops, residencies and lecturing internationally at venues such the Experimental Media Lab at Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, Vooruit, Kunstencentrum Gent, Belgium and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.