Giovanni Anceschi (Milan, 1939) is an artist and designer specialized in multimodal communication, active in Italy and abroad. At the end of the fifties he befriends Enrico Baj and attends the courses of philosophy held by Enzo Paci, focusing on the issues of temporality and relations and in particular on the “Cartesian Meditations” by Husserl. He attends the courses held by Cesare Musatti who puts him in contact with perception studies and psychoanalysis. He starts attending the courses of Achille Funi as an auditor at the Academy of Brera, where he meets Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Grazia Varisco, and lately Gabriele Devecchi. Together with them he participates to the activities of the art gallery Azimut, coordinated by the artists Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani. Between 1959 and 1960 he co-founds Gruppo T and participates to a series of exhibitions on programmed art as well as to the New Tendencies international movement. In 1964 he conceives “Ambiente a shock luminosi”, an environment devoted to the topic of perceptual disorientation, contraction and dilution of time. In collaboration with Boriani he installs in Zagreb (1965) “Ambiente per un test di estetica sperimentale”, which marks the convergence of systematic and programmed artistic research with Anceschi’s interest in proairetic and informational esthetics as defined by Max Bense and Abraham Moles. In the seventies his artistic work also addresses the field of visual poetry, as well as total poetry. In the field of design Anceschi approaches the themes connected with processes that take place over time: from corporate identity to exhibition design, from digital to interaction design. He is the first teacher addressing the disciplines of communication design within Italian universities. He has taught for forty years, with a specific interest in the pedagogy of design (Klee, Kandinsky, Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Maldonado, Munari), which led to the foundation of a general discipline of the configuration (Basic design). As a historian, theorist, and advocate of multi-modal culture, he has published a large number of books and essays.

In 2009 he participates to the exhibition “Œuvres ouvertes / Vertige de la liste” at Louvre Contemporain, curated by Umberto Eco. In 2011 he designes “InNoveTempi”, an iPhone application that translates a randomized interactive artwork of programmed graphics conceived in the sixties for nowadays Apple devices. His works are part of public and private collections and of the permanent collection of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Museo del Novecento in Milan, Gallerie d’Italia in Milan, and MACBA in Buenos Aires. In 2014 he partecipates in Turn Me On: European and Latin American Kinetic Art 1948-1979, Christie's, London.