Formed in 2022 by Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano, the artist duo Wen New Atelier positions its practice at the intersection of language, art, 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. 

Drawing on a wide range of conceptual frameworks, from speculative literary devices to the design of imperfection and performative writing, they create unconventional systems of reading and writing that employ détournement and challenge familiar conventions. Their projects take on hybrid forms, as literary machines, poem-objects, paintings generated from procedural writing, and plays co-written with artificial intelligence.

Kalen Iwamoto (born in Vancouver, Canada) holds a Research Master’s degree in the social sciences from the University of Amsterdam (2008) and studied Literature, art and contemporary thought at Université Paris Diderot. Raised in a Korean-Japanese family with a history of migration, she maintains an ambivalent relationship to language, seeing it both as a system of constraints and as a site for poetic and critical experimentation. In her practice, she has developed constrained writing techniques (Littor[alter]ms, 2022) and explored alternative implements and surfaces for poetic compositions (Micropoetry, 2025).

Julien Silvano (born in Amiens, France) graduated with a DNSEP in Art from the École Supérieure d’Art de Grenoble in 2002. His multidisciplinary practice engages visual forms that subvert the high-res and high-tech narratives of the design and technology industries. He has reactivated defective electronic machines (White Spots, 2011), archived and recontextualized pirated content (CamRIP Shadows, 2010), and painted user interfaces (Viewers, 2014-2020).

Their work has been exhibited in France and internationally, and they are Lumen Prize finalists. They live and work in Nord-Isère, France.