www.futurefarmers.com

In 1995, Futurefarmers was formed by Amy Franceschini. Futurefarmers is a New Media construct specializing in creative investigation and development of new work. Through collaboration, they explore the relationship of concept and creative process between interdisciplinary artists. Their studio has gained international acclaim for its uniquely evocative visual style and fresh approach to design.

Amy Franceschini is a new media artist/designer working with notions of community, sustainable environments and the conflicting rituals of humans and nature. Her work manifests "on" and "offline" in the form of dynamic websites, installations and printed matter. Franceschini sees herself as a farmer and looks to nature as the ultimate laboratory. Her work challenges the physicality of place and media. Since 1998, she has been collaborating with with Josh On, Sascha Merg and Michael Swaine to realize projects such as Holding Patterns, They Rule and Communiculture. In 1995, she co-founded Atlas magazine, one of the first 3 websites to be collected by a museum: SFMOMA.

Michael Swaine is a performance artist work work playfully provokes interaction and establishes micro-communities. On the 15th of every month, from noon to 6pm, Swaine sets up shop in San Francisco's blighted Tenderloin District. Pushing a homemade cart mounted with a treadle-operated sewing machine, Swaine offers his services as a street tailor, mending whatever garments the neighborhood's denizens bring him. He considers the project a collaboration between himself and those whose clothes he patches, mends, hems and darns -- an opportunity to create social interaction where there would otherwise be none. Born in Buffalo, New York, Swaine earned a B.F.A. from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University before going on to study advanced ceramics and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1999, Swaine has collaborated on numerous projects with Amy Franceschini as part of the artists collective Futurefarmers.

Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine visited Anderson Ranch in the Spring of 2006 as visiting artists in the digital media program. Their project was entitled "Investigation into the Production of Hydrogen in Green Algae"