Amy Franceschini

Amy Franceschini is a pioneer in the burgeoning field of net art, an art form that is created, circulated and experienced through the Internet. She is the founder of Futurefarmers, an art and design collaborative dedicated to expressing environmental and community interests through digital media. In "Shaken and Stirred," Spark checks out her piece, "Fingerprint Maze," at Pond gallery.

While playing video games one day with a friend, Franceschini imagined getting inside her own fingerprint and finding her way around within its twisting grooves as one would within a labyrinth. Her latest piece provides just such an experience. A scanner takes an image of a participant's print, which is then modeled into a virtual, three-dimensional maze and projected onto a wall. The participant can then enter into the labyrinth of his or her own fingerprint as though it were a topiary maze. Franceschini has plans to save these mazes and allow others to try them out via the Web.

In addition to founding Futurefarmers, Franceschini helped to start Atlas, an online magazine, in 1995. She has taught at art and design in schools across the Bay Area, including Stanford University. She has shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Cooper-Hewitt, the National Design Museum and Transmediale in Berlin, and was invited, along with Futurefarmers, to participate in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.