Wen New Atelier is the collaborative name of the married artist duo Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano, who treat language as a malleable material through literature machines, poem-objects, and blockchain-based publishing that probe the slippages of meaning between human and nonhuman systems.,,Founded in 2022, the atelier draws on Oulipo, Fluxus, and Surrealist traditions of rule-based and participatory writing, and has exhibited across France, Japan, and the United States.,,
Iwamoto was born in Vancouver to a Korean-Japanese family and holds a research master's degree in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam, earned in 2008, alongside studies in literature, art and contemporary thought at Université Paris Diderot. A writer and translator, she has developed her own constrained-writing techniques, including Littor[alter]ms, 2022.Silvano, born in Amiens, France,graduated from the École Supérieure d'Art de Grenoble in 2002and has worked with a tinkerer's instinct for technology,reactivating defective electronics in his own White Spots, 2011, and painting user interfaces in Viewers, 2014-2020.The atelier, as they describe it, is an alchemy of Iwamoto's love of puzzles and games and Silvano's poetic, tinkering approach to technology.
In 2022 the duo inscribed a play co-written with an AI, Romeo and Juliape, line by line onto the Ethereum blockchain, allowing a text partially authored by GPT-3 to circulate as a decentralised publication rather than a book.,Their Miniscriber, 2025, a synthesiser-styled device for remixing and sampling existing text into new poems,was a finalist for the Lumen Prize's Literature and Poetry award.,For the 2025 “Computational Poetry” show at NEORT++ in Tokyo, they created Hai-Tech, a generative poem bridging haiku tradition and digital culture that became their first on-chain generative project, with each output generated at the moment of minting.
In 2026 the duo presented “Bar CodeX”, a solo show at the MAC Bar of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon that turned the bar's arcade games, DJ sets, and signage into interactive literary devices.,For the show they collaborated with the musician Agoria on the Miniscriber Duo, Agoria Edition, an audio-reactive version of their conceptual poetry synthesiser built around his exclusive track Exist in Silence, accessible only to the work's collector. On the opening night they performed together as a live “Language Jockey” set, pairing the Miniscriber with Agoria's DJ set.
