Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano are the art couple behind Wen New, an atelier that dwells in the liminal space between 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, for example, the duo researches and experiments with unconventional reading and writing practices that open up our experience with text, while employing détournement to subvert and reframe meaning to reveal hidden structures within language and technology.

This research and practice are born out a dialogue between the duo’s individual propensities and preoccupations. 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 divide between the physical and the digital, literature and art. Their work has been exhibited in Paris, New York, Berlin, Budapest, and beyond.

They are based in the French countryside outside Lyon, France.