Bio

I was born in Rome in 1985, to Gianni Giansanti and Anna Magliocchetti. My father was a photographer. Over time I took other paths, but images have remained a constant presence.

I started out in his studio, Immaginazione, producing and editing video: reportage, sound and my first digital experiments.

Then came theatre, which for about ten years was an important part of my life. At Teatro Argot, with Tiziano and Maurizio Panici, I worked on digital set design, projections and video mapping: images that had to inhabit a space and share the stage with the actors.

After years of projecting images, I wanted to step inside them. When the first Oculus Rift headsets arrived, I had a very precise idea in mind: walking into Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. A wish simple enough to describe, rather less simple to make real.

In 2014 I founded Oniride with Mitchell Broner Squire and Fabio Morgan. We were making virtual and augmented reality when hardly anyone had ever worn a headset, and we worked with MAXXI and UNESCO as well as Samsung, Nissan and ENEL. The Starry Night remained an experiment for a long time, until it found its way into the exhibitions of Grande Exhibitions. In 2020 Oniride was acquired by DM Cultura.

Today I teach and coordinate the Digital Applications for the Visual Arts programme at Istituto Pantheon Design & Technology. I work on artificial intelligence, design and creative coding. I build things, run experiments and bring this work into the classroom, where students’ questions have the advantage of unsettling even what I thought I had understood.

Seen from here, the path holds together photography, theatre, virtual worlds and code. While I was walking it, of course, it was far less orderly.