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Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici

Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici is an artistic multimediatic group founded in Florence in 1984 spring by Antonio Gessi ( Gorizia, 1954) and Andrea Zingoni ( Florence, 1955) creators of the first computer strip in the history of comics, published on the magazine Frigidaire From 1984 to 2000 the group featured numerous members: Maurizio Dami, Lometta Mugnai, Roberto Davini, Marco Paoli, and Giancarlo Torri. GMM defined themselves as " hackers of the imaginary". Their works feature a way of using consumer technologies that straddles the line between post-modern and cyberpunk. Their works cover various genres, such as videos, computer installations, music, artificial reality installations, video art, television collaborations, and the invention of viral phenomena.

On May 1984 the magazine Frigidaire published the computer-comics Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici. This would be the first ever-made computer comic in the world. Shatter by Mike Saenz, often quoted to be the first computer-realized comic, will be published in 1985.

The story presented as Modern Nightly Melodramma, recounts the misadventures of the transgenderextra cyborg Ella, who is devastated by a complicated love story and stuffed with alcohol and barbiturates is subjected to violence by the three infamous Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, dull humanoid government robots completely deprived of whatsoever form of conscience. The comic was then turned into a video with the addition of a piece written by Zingoni. The sequence of images, created by Glessi directly on an Apple II+ computer, is accompanied by the music of Maurizio Dami (Alexander Robotnick), also created with an Apple II.

In July 1984 the second the second computer-comic Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici contro Dracula came out on Frigidaire. An old, tired, and disillusioned Count Dracula is paid a visit by the three GMM who want to be vampirized so that they can live eternally. Infected by their tainted blood Dracula dies in a " grief filled with joy".The video adaptation won the First Prize for Best Italian Video at the second Turin International Young Cinema Festival in 1984[7]. The computer comic was also adapted into a performance starring Alessandro Benvenuti as Dracula and three actor-posers - Rolando Mugnai, Roberto Nistri, and Paola Pacifico - who played the three GMMs and wore costumes created by Loretta Mugnai.

In December 1984 a gothic computerized Photo comiccalled Il Colore delle Tenebre was published on Frigidaire. This story features a type of image processing that would be further developed in the television series Le avventure di Marionetti, produced in June 1985 for Carlo Massarini's program Non necessariamente, which aired on Rai1 from October 30, 1986. Marionetti is a tender, ironic character who is always teetering between situations of trivial comedy (Marionetti/marionette) and sophisticated electronic-futuristic atmospheres (Marionetti/Marinetti)

In 1985, an LP for Materiali Sonori entitled GMM was also released[10]. Maurizio Dami, in the role of Robotnick, was responsible for the musical aspect. The album mixes house and dance tracks with electronic arrangements of famous pieces by Duke Ellington (Caravan) and Gato Barbieri( [|Last Tango in Paris]). The line-up includes several names of Italian jazz instrumentalists such as Stefano Cantini, Diego Carraresi, and Fabio Morgera.

Their first video-computer installation, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, dates back to 1985 and was exhibited at the Church of Santa Marta in Ivrea[12] and later at the Studio Leonardi in Genoa, on the occasion of the group's first solo exhibition[13]. Based on a project by Zingoni inspired by vintage photographs in Mugnai's possession, the installation consists of several monitors arranged around the room on which digitized photographs, "pictorially" treated and organized for viewing by Glessi, of Indian men and women in traditional dress, scroll, compose and fragment themselves, offering a reading of Indian culture that is both spiritual and post-colonial. The "material" part of the installation, the objects and compositions, are created by Loretta Mugnai. Maurizio Dami's music and post-produced recitations in the style of computer comics help to create a contemplative atmosphere (Video document). In the text accompanying the Genoa exhibition, Franco Bolelli, who was to become a crucial figure in the evolution of the GMM's work, writes: "the work no longer presents itself as an obligatory path, but takes shape as sensitivity, state of mind, mental furniture, interior landscape, aesthetic horizon. Not as a model or message, but as temperature and as an atmospheric phenomenon."

Also dating back to 1985, at the Valentino Castle in Turin, was the performance Landscapes of Memory - Paradise, a telefax interaction with [|Vienna], [|Pittsburgh], [|Melbourne](Aus) and [|Bristol] Video artwork This groundbreaking performance involved the production and exchange of images that were gradually reworked in each center before being reintroduced into the fax connection circuit to produce multiple collective works.

In 1985, for the first edition of Pitti Trend, GMM created " Ellissi di vento", a "performance fashion show" for the brand Frutta e Verdura by Loretta Mugnai. The fashion world also partially includes the 1988 "Puccini/Opera", a stage installation directed by Zingoni with electronic elaborations by Glessi, commissioned by Centro Moda Firenze and later Pitti ImmagineVideo. The installation explores the dynamics of the mediatization of the [|performing arts]. On two large vertical projections, actors in costumes by Samuele Mazza, Sandro Pestelli, and others-lip-sync to arias from [|Giacomo Puccini]'s operatic repertoire taken from La Bohème,[|Tosca],[|Madama Butterfly] and [|Turandot]. The performers are immersed in an electronic environment which, thanks to a glass-mirror cage designed by Glessi, gives the audience a three-dimensional perception. From the video installation, presented at Pitti Trend, a video was derived that won the first prize at the U-Tape festival of the Video Art Center at [|Palazzo dei Diamanti] in [|Ferrara]

The proximity to the world of [|contemporary art]and the incursions into the field of [|fashion] serve the GMMs to remain autonomous in their artistic choices and to stay updated on the evolution of technologies. Glessi abandoned the Apple II in 1987 with the release of the[|Macintosh II], an "open" machine with greater video capabilities than the first black and white Mac. In 1986 Zingoni began using video cameras, and in 1987, in the company of Glessi and supported by the new member of the group Giancarlo Torri, he became a sort of resident VJ of Tenax, a symbolic nightclub of Florence by night of the 80s. Zingoni developed a system of twenty-five monitors on rails, which allowed him to present, in the most varied configurations, the videos produced in the new GMM studio in Florence. The Tenax represents a sort of gym for the GMMs, and the GMM studio a place of extreme visual experimentation where hours of videos are post-produced weekly to be tested by the public. From these experiments, the series of home videos 'GMM CYBERNETIC ULTRALINE - HACKER TEST' was born.

In the late 1980s, Zingoni pushed the capabilities of the Fairlight CVI Fairlight Computer Video Instrumentdigital video enhancer to the extreme to obtain lysergic videos, in line with cyberdelic culture based on the possibilities of using electronic images as a tool for meditation and expansion of [|consciousness]Video In line with this, the GMMs, with the theoretical contribution of Roberto Davini, created the Electronic Mandalas and other hypnotic videos in 1989, which they distributed through the Hacker Test home video series[19]. 'These Electronic Mandalas at first glance resemble a geometric metaphor of the [|universe]. Images that for us possess an indefinable quality that makes them both terrible and venerable at the same time. In their becoming they allow us to reflect on the origin of electronics and its possible naturalness.

Anni Novanta

In 1991, the GMMs designed the installation Tecnomaya in Infotown (New Dangers replace Fear), presented at the Prato Contemporary Art Museum. Taking up the intuitions of artists and collectives from the 1960s such as [|Nam June Paik] and [|USCO], the GMMs accelerate psychedelic iconography in response to the exponential growth of information and visual stimuli in late [|capitalism]. Tecnomaya in Infotown (New Dangers replace Fear) brings together four years of research begun in 1987 with the techno videos for the Tenax nightclub in Florence, continued with the 1988 installation Run Go Get out of Here at the Murnik Gallery in [|Milan][22] and the 1989 Electronic Mandalas. The layering of messages generates the Tecnomaya: the illusion multiplied by technology that takes shape in stratified, infinite, indecipherable information, where false and real are confused.