Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano are the art and life partners behind Wen New, an art and language atelier dedicated to conceptual experimentations in literature and art. Together, they have produced book-objects, paintings generated from texts, a blockchain play cowritten with AI, and other works that straddle the divide between the physical and the digital, literature and art. They have been exhibited in Paris, New York, Berlin, Budapest, among other places.
"We inhabit the hyphens of language-art and physical-digital. We dwell in the liminal spaces between genres, forms, media, and other predefined fields of practice, and trace their transformations as they move across, through and beyond these spaces."
Kalen Iwamoto is a conceptual writer and artist. Her concept-driven work is based on a transdisciplinary and transmedia practice at the intersection of art, text, and technology. She takes a playful and experimental approach in exploring unconventional reading and writing experiences, giving visual and material form to literary concepts that invite us to contemplate the meaning of text, and our relationship to it in contemporary culture. She is also the founder of the crypto writers discord and co-founder of theVERSEverse, a literary gallery where poems are works of art.
Julien Silvano is a multidisciplinary artist, who lives and works in France. He holds an MFA (DNSEP) from the School of Art in Grenoble (École Supérieure d’Art de Grenoble). His work interrogates our relationship to systems of communication and information-sharing through visual and plastic works that bring physical and digital material into dialogue. His work offers critical reflections on contemporary social and cultural phenomena through dying machines, the design of imperfection, the encounter of traditional practices and new technologies, retro-futuristic objects, and human-machine interactions.