SELECTED WORKS

A selection from a series of pieces that create a virtual space as a container to conjure, or otherwise relate with, a genius loci, or spirit of place. Also functioning as a talisman, this piece can be used as a limen, or door, to access and embody its constituent symbols. Movement Temple presents the icons of Venus and the Cybele as spiritual intercessors and genius loci of a hyper-positioned virtual nightlife space. Here they are purveyors of all that moves across the threshold between the dimensions of time and space, corporeal and digital, imaginal and real. Offered before them is an amalgam of ritual dancing performed in Venus’ honor. Selections of video documentation from the ritual nightlife project, YOLOROBICS, were analyzed to extract OpenPose data for each dancer. This was then combined and used to drive an AI image generation model, producing the moving mass of limbs displayed within the temple.

Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, spiritMesh is part of the larger project of Spucchi’s own Carrier Bag Theory of Magic, which explores the narrative container as an invitation for intimacy and conference with desire– a feminist critique on the phallogocentrism of traditional texts versus the mutability of stories. spiritMesh is an interactive hypertext ritual that applies the power of the narrative form to the hyperdimensionality of the digital to create enmeshment with spirit and desire. Challenging perceptual defaults, users triangulate themselves in narrative space by inputting a desire, an obstacle, and a magically-charged offering. A custom GPT servitor, built and propitiated by Spucchi, liases as an emissary of the digital by generating custom interactive web elements that lead the user through a ritual. By weaving desire into the fabric of the digital and artificial, the user accesses the magical potential and charge of the technical zeitgeist.

Segment from an original speculative fiction monologue, spoken from the perspective of a god-like, benevolent AI. Initial brainstorming was done in collaboration with custom-built GPTs trained on speculative fiction, science fiction, cyberpunk, cybernetic, and associated critical texts – a way for the artist to call upon and be in conversation with the geist of this literature. Paired with original sound design, animations were generated with the open source StableDiffusion model based on original imagery that served as seed frames for each scene. Created during LAB#03 Synthetic Minds at Medialab Matadero, Madrid in 2024 for the EAT ME project, which focused on the post-human potentials of cannibalism, consumption, and vore in the face of emerging technologies and AI futures.

WitchAid is an ongoing social research project that explores the intersection of witchcraft and social justice. The project began in 2022 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the artist's desire to create a community for witches and occult practitioners to share resources and support one another. WitchAid challenges the notion of the witch as a solitary figure and instead seeks to create a network of ritualists who donate their diviniation skills during a live fundraiser to support a witch in need.

DANCER <> SELECTOR is an ongoing research practice with DJ and curator Matthew A. Coleman that explores the relationships between dancer, DJ, and astrological events. We co-curate dance music through digital/physical crate-digging and by attending dance events worldwide. Our research is furthered through monthly studio sessions where we construct/deconstruct sets and choreography that activate the dancing body into various levels of ekstasis. These sessions are the basis for our quarterly live parties with our ritual working group and selected guests.

YOLOROBICS is an ongoing, decade-long ecstatic ritual practice held in conference with continuing members of the original magical working group, and led by Spucchi in the role of host and psychopomp. Beginning as an act of queer resistance at Brigham Young University in 2011, YOLOROBICS developed its own ritual language, mythos, and practice as inspired by the mystery cults of ancient Greece. Meeting under auspicious astrological timings, YOLOROBICS gathers quarterly to perform a series of ritual acts that include dance, chanting, and the use of altered states. With members trained in Butoh, YOLOROBICS is a practice of ecstatic embodiment that seeks to activate the dancing body into various levels of ekstasis, both for gnosis and self-realization through the meeting of the spiritual Other. The her(me)s event took advantage of the adjacent Mercury retrograde period as a liminal and latent space to explore and embody the vast potentialities of Hermes’ archetypal genderfuckery.

Total Personae is an ongoing social research project that explores the construction, deconstruction, and queering of identity through the creation of "total personae" - fully-realized potential selves that exist in absolute alignment with one's desire. Total Personae are formed through the radical embodiment of self-actualization, made through declarations of aesthetics, speech, affect, and aura. Referencing the club kids and cyberfeminists of the 1980s-90s and Anton LaVey's Total Environments, this practice seeks to empower the individual to exude and embody their own eros, free from the constraints of normative social structures. Jove Spucchi is the most recent and resonant constellation of the artist's self, serving as a locus of intersection for the disparate narratives they have lived within: religion, occulture, queer nightlife, and the tech world. Jove first presented this corpus at the Occulture Conference in Berlin during the fall of 2023.

Wetware Gallery (currently on hiatus) was one of the first online galleries presented in Web VR. Hosting exhibitions of net art, VR experiences, and other digital new media work, Jove Spucchi (as persona Mark Thomas) curated the inaugural exhibition, showcasing their body of VR work in 2016 using experimental browser technologies that were briefly made available in Google Chrome. Wetware Gallery continued to show new works until 2020 when Chrome removed the features necessary for the gallery to function. Spucchi is currently working on an updated version made possible by the stabilizing Web XR spec, and plans to relaunch the site as an experimental virtual exhibition and collaborative curatorial research platform in 2024.

Thom Tano was a social practice and total persona developed in 2010 by the artist as a way of queering their own identity and escaping the societal, psychological, and magical implications of a given name. Thom Tano was the container for both a net art studio practice and work within night life in Salt Lake City, Boston, and San Francisco from 2010-2015 and included the creation of the DieKrü parties and PLASTK makeup brand. An archive of Thom's work can be found at https://tumblr.com/thomtano.

Anna-Aware fill is a digital studio practice and associated Tumblr blog that examines the authority of cultural power-holders over images and aesthetics. Utilizing Adobe Photoshop's "Content-Aware Fill", an early version of AI image editing, the artist creates a series of photomanipulations from found images of Vogue editor Anna Wintour. In each image, all of the non-Anna content is removed and replaced by imagery generated from what remains.

Emote is an early net art piece in which the artist explores the performance of emotion through the mimesis of the emoticon and their flattened affect. Created in response to their work being censored for queer content, Emote depicts the constricted range of emotions they felt they were allowed to express in their work.

Billboard Top 10... is an early work that explores the artist's interest in the concept of summation and how it applies to the compression of the vast stream of information one is affronted with in the digital age. In this work, the artist takes the videos Billboard Top 10 songs of the week and composites the audio and visual channels into a single experience.