Wen New Atelier
Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano are the art couple behind Wen New , an atelier that exists at the intersection of art, language, and technology. Their polysemic works, at once playful and critical, lay bare the ambivalence of contemporary digital life and advance alternative ways of imagining, using, and relating to text and technology. Through conceptual prisms such as speculative literary devices, the design of imperfection, or performance writing, the duo researches and experiments with unconventional reading and writing practices that open up our experience with text, employing détournement to subvert and reframe meaning to reveal hidden structures within language and technology.
Julien Silvano, who holds an MFA (DNSEP) from the school of Fine Art in Grenoble (École Supérieure d’Art de Grenoble), has tinkered with technology and sculptures from an early age, while Kalen Iwamoto, raised between two languages and cultures, embraces ambivalence and play in her relationship with language to explore its structures as both constraint and possibility. Together, they have produced literature machines, book-objects, paintings generated from procedural writing on text, a blockchain play co-written with AI, and other works that straddle the physical and the digital, and literature, and art. Their work was a finalist for The Lumen Prize in 2025, and has been exhibited in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Berlin, Budapest, and beyond. They are based in the countryside outside Lyon, France.
