The Light Within: Jen Panepinto's Quantum Spirit

By @JustinWetch

"I really didn't do anything artistic until I was like 16."

Then that first critique happened. The photography teacher started talking about her image, pulling meanings, finding symbols, reading stories she hadn't known she'd written. Jen Panepinto sat there stunned. How could one photograph hold so much?

"I could not believe the feedback I got. For me it was just like, how can you interpret so much from one image?"

She caught the art bug that day. Hard.

From that moment, sixteen-year-old Jen became obsessed. She shot everything, filling binders with film negatives before she even hit college. While other kids played sports or hung out, she was hunting for that next frame, that next revelation about what images could communicate.

At Pratt Institute for photography, she started thinking conceptually about intention and meaning. But when graduation came in 1998, she faced a truth:

"I didn't want to be a 'professional photographer' in the commercial sense. I did not want to sit in a studio all day with hard lights in my face."

She was too shy for that world. Art had become her language precisely because she couldn't speak directly. So she pivoted to graphic design, earned a master's at SVA, and entered the corporate world. But that bug she caught at sixteen never left.

Martha Stewart Living came first. The intensity stunned her. "It was the first time I saw people living their job and becoming their work. The attention to detail, to perfection almost, was incredible."

These people breathed their craft. They showed Jen what it meant to see projects through, a lesson that stuck.

"I've always been great at starting projects, but not necessarily finishing them. Seeing people who finished projects and pushed for perfection showed me how fulfilling it can be."

Then came Toys"R"Us. A decade there.

"I loved working there. It was very creative. We had a lot of freedom for a corporate design group. Who doesn't like Toys"R"Us? It just had such good vibes."

The toy industry kept her curious, kept her seeing things simply.

"I put myself in that child mindset a lot. It helped keep me curious and seeing things in a broken-down, simple way."

Between these corporate gigs, Jen launched her own venture: a portion-control bowl. She manufactured it, sold it for five years, even landed on QVC and briefly in the MoMA Design Store. "I always think that's super cool," she laughs about the MoMA placement.

But it ended with a shipping container full of unsold bowls. "I decided I really wanted to focus more on art."

The failure didn't break her. "I learned that I could do something if I set my mind to it. That stayed with me."

In 2020, someone invited her to design a Cryptovoxels gallery.

"They said, 'We have a gallery in the metaverse,' and I was like, 'What? What is that?'"

Her husband was already deep in it, minting NFTs and sitting in Clubhouse spaces way before she understood any of it. He's a glassblower, an artist too. His enthusiasm pulled her in.

Meanwhile, a group of artist friends on Twitter started experimenting with Wombo Dream, an early AI art app. @denver_donkey had created 100 pieces for wildfire relief. The images were surreal, abstract, fascinating.

The friends developed a ritual.

"We'd always talk about our dreams and their meaning. We were like, 'Why don't we just do some prompting before we go to bed and see if we can influence our dreams?'"

Jen started feeding her daily emotions into the AI.

 "I would put in my emotions, sort of like a diary, and just see what I got."

The results felt like conversation. Like looking in a mirror, but not.

"For a while, I felt like I learned a whole bunch about myself based on what my feelings looked like to the AI model."

Then @MathieuFrance from ArtCrush bought one of her pieces on Mint Gold Dust. "That really gave me so much confidence to just keep going."

The whirlwind had begun.

Jen had done dark work before. Trauma work. It was hard to talk about, hard to live with. She made a decision.

"That series was me deciding to look at the good side of life."

Manifestations became her declaration of intentional positivity. She started blending her Polaroid photographs of nature with AI generations, injecting light into darkness. And then came the rainbows.

"That's when I started using rainbows all the time, because when I think back to my childhood, that's what I used to draw when I was really little."

What does the rainbow represent?

"Trying to be good, do good, be intentional. Keep the childlike curiosity. It's a nod to making things better. Choosing to make things better."

She kept her figures faceless at first.

"To keep the work about the emotion, and to not have judgments about the person. It's kind of a way of being anonymous so anyone can relate to it."

The work wasn't just positive. It was deliberately, defiantly positive. A choice made daily against her natural pessimism.

"I have to refocus my thoughts all day long to look at the good side of things."

Art became her tool for that refocusing.

Picture Jen's desk: papers everywhere, plants, fresh flowers from her husband, a photo of her son. Twitter Spaces or podcasts playing. Coffee, always coffee. "A ton of coffee. I love it."

When she works, she enters a particular state. "I will prompt for hours. I will generate and generate and generate."

There's a song that plays in her head, an old LL Cool J track she's repurposed: "Doin' it and doin' it and doin' it." In her mind it becomes: "Generate and generate and generate now."

Hundreds of images in a day. She's hunting for something specific.

"I'm usually looking for that nuanced difference in the moment. The changes I look for are very subtle. It's like I'm just trying to find that thing that is just a little off or strange."

Her prompts stay simple, photographic.

"In almost every prompt is 'photographic.' Once it starts to go more in the painterly realm, I just don't live there in my brain."

She throws in film terms: Ektachrome, flash photography, long exposures.

Everything goes through Photoshop. She animates frame by frame. "That's where I get into my flow state," she says about the painstaking process. Sometimes she shoots with Tri-X black and white film, grounding her digital experiments in analog texture.

"Quantum Spirit" came from a late-night conversation with her husband about human connection. "I didn't realize 'quantum' was gonna be used all over the place. I thought I was really being smart and inventive!"

But the name captured something essential.

"I'm so intrigued by science and spirituality, and those two words kind of say it all. I love seeing how things work, but also there's always a mystery as to why."

She wasn't raised religious. She made up her own spirituality.

"My art is almost like explaining that. The way I feel about spirituality without playing into a narrative that already exists. I'm just trying to figure it out."

Life, she believes, builds to moments of thunder and lightning. "You get to a point where you're gonna learn something, and when you do, it's like this burst of energy comes out of you and releases."

The glitch effects in her work? "That's about my anxiousness and my ADHD and my overthinking, but translating that into something hopeful and something that's bigger than me."

Tara Brach's "Radical Acceptance" shapes her practice. Looking to the light. Accepting where you are in the moment.

"I honestly don't know what I would do if I couldn't be expressive every day. I have so much joy from creating art. It fills me up in a way I can't even describe."

Then the key revelation: "I feel like I'm healing myself every time I make something."

Jen credits early collector Bramald for believing in her work when she barely believed in it herself. Artists like Keziai, Infinite Mantra, 0009, Noper, and Nomads and Vagabonds keep her inspired. She shouts out MacBeth ("Love MacBeth"), Rocketgirl for ongoing support, and ex_mortal as a Web3 influence. Brian Brinkman remains special: "Bryan Brinkman was the first artist I saw in Cryptovoxels. I will always be a Bryan Brinkman fan."

She's particularly moved by Danielle King's Mother Series. "There's not enough art that speaks about being a mom. There needs to be more."

One day, she plans to make that series herself. "Some of my most intense feelings have come from that."

Her photographic influences run deep: Larry Sultan's intimate domestic work, Lauren Greenfield's Hollywood shadow explorations, and especially Tina Barney's Theatre of Manners with its family dynamics. The surrealist group Exquisite Workers with Roger Haus and Anna Dart brought her into that Oculus show.

When asked what she wishes people understood about her work, Jen is clear:

"I absolutely love what I do. It's just mostly about me being honest about my life experience. I am very grateful to be in web3, where my work can connect with anyone, and I am grateful to everyone who supports me to create another day."

Then she adds with a laugh:

"I'm not gonna stop until I get stopped."

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @jenpanepinto recommends @MutagenSamurai, @danielleking, and @margaretonline.