Jenny Filipetti is a New York-born, Milan-based artist working at the crossroads of art, design, and humanistic technology. Her artistic practice explores how humans, machines, and other entities perceive and make meaning within shared environments—navigating semiotic systems and atmospheric phenomena (memory, color, light, breath, time, sky) as meeting points across different sensory ecologies.

Building with technology since the modem years, she also translates these sensibilities into her design work through her studio CHROMAKAIROS—developing interactive technologies, learning journies, and participatory processes that restore more generative relationships between people and their technological tools.

Jenny holds an MFA in Emergent Digital Practices from the University of Denver and a degree in Art-Semiotics from Brown University, where she also studied computational biology.

Artistic Practice

Jenny’s artistic practice explores how humans, machines, and other entities perceive and make meaning within shared environments, attuning to the information flows and relational networks that run through them. She frequently navigates semiotic systems and atmospheric phenomena—memory, color, light, breath, time, sky—as meeting points across different sensory ecologies.

Her work spans interactive installations, visual art, and performance that propose new kinds of sensory experiences, tools, and instruments. From Web 1.0 through early AI models in the mid-2000s to custom programmed interactive systems, she seeks to enter into relation with alternative forms of intelligence and creativity: that of machines, of course, but also of snails, antennas, the sky…

She was part of the team that prototyped the world’s first wearable luminescent biosensor—a now-patented technology awarded at the 2017 International Biodesign Challenge at MoMA—and was a finalist that same year in the Arte Laguna International Art Prize for Breath Vessels, an interactive data instrument translating exhalations into 3D-printed clay forms.

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Teaching + Learning Design

Jenny is a former professor of human-centered design and innovation at Inworks at the University of Colorado Denver and Anschutz Medical Campus (now the Smart Futures Lab), an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to developing student and community capacities in design thinking, computational thinking, and rapid prototyping towards addressing complex human challenges. She’s also developed and taught courses in creative coding, Internet of Things, web design, and other topics at the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Denver, and Laba Douala University.

Her obsession with physical and tactile technology crystallized at the Auraria Library, where she designed and directed a new suite of creative technology, documentation, and digital rights learning spaces—shaping firsthand how technical and design choices actively shape cognitive patterns and create new pathways for discovery.

Earlier in her career, she curated technology and design content for millions of international readers at designboom, navigating firsthand the shift in digital social practices and power structures that occurred the early to mid 2010’s, a topic she wrote about to commemorate designboom’s 25th anniversary in 2024.

Community + Cultural Work

Jenny cofounded and formerly directed Immersive Denver, a community organization connecting the Colorado experiential creative community since its first educational summit in 2018. The organization works to generate new audiences for regional immersive work and advance efforts around performer and participant safety, agency, access, and inclusion. It remains the leading regional organization in the United States dedicated to fortifying a local community of immersive artists and designers.

Since 2020, she’s worked with Majestic Collaborations on mechanisms to increase community preparedness for disaster by building cross-fluencies and relationships between arts/event workers and emergency professionals—serving as key architect of the ReadyWhen framework and ACRA mapping (arts and cultural resilience asset) methodology.

Her work has also included projects with cultural institutions like Palazzo Morando and Palazzo Reale, the Afro Fashion Association, and developing 🗝️ Le Chiavi del Quartiere, an online platform for her neighborhood in southern Milan to encourage discovery and encounter with the people and places that make it unique. She is a volunteer and board member of the Associazione Parco Ticinello.

Chromakairos

In 2023, Jenny founded CHROMAKAIROS, a small design studio and fabrication lab translating these sensibilities into tangible tools for creative mavericks, the arts and cultural sector, and educational programs in both the US and Italy. Operating as both design practice and pedagogical project, the studio specializes in interactive technology, participatory processes, and learning design that engender more generative ways for people to engage with the people, places, and information around them.

CHROMAKAIROS emerged from the idea that in our hyper-connected yet increasingly isolating world, intimate-scale interventions can restore the possibility for genuine encounter. The studio is based in Milan, working with a trusted network of local artisans and production partners.

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