About
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.
Kalen Iwamoto is also cofounder, with multidisciplinary artist Julien Silvano, of 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.
Works
Romeo and Juliape
KALEN IWAMOTO
Dialogue written in collaboration with GPT-3
Produced by Wen New Atelier
203 replicas registered on the Ethereum blockchain
Writer and conceptual artist Kalen Iwamoto turns AI into an object of linguistic research, using it as a writing partner.
Romeo and Juliape is a love dialogue between a human (Juliape, who lives under the pen of the artist) and a conversational chatbot (Romeo, embodied by GPT-3). Through consistent exchange, Kalen Iwamoto manages to get her interlocutor to formulate profound sentences, as worthy of a man questioning the human condition in the digital age as it is of a distraught lover. Each replica exists as an NFT, the acquisition of which entitles the owner to a signed and numbered physical copy of the book compiling the entire play.
If this work evokes AI as a conversational partner (with already many applications in our lives), it also raises the question of AI's capacity to develop feelings. According to some, if intelligence is a pure product of the brain, an artificial brain should be capable of producing emotions and feelings. According to others, this is impossible, since a feeling cannot be transposed into a simple command (AI only understands commands).
Artwork presented at « AI, My Sparring Partner", an exhibition commissioned by Havas, Paris, 2024.
Data Lakes in the Waning Moon
KALEN IWAMOTO
Data Lakes in the Waning Moon by Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano (WEN NEW ATELIER) is a visual poem, moving and sparkling, that dialogues with the ode to water in James Joyce's Ulysses. An algorithm ceaselessly reshuffles the words in Joyce's passage. The work speaks to the overabundance of text in the digital age, and invites us to reflect on the regeneration of meaning.
Artwork presented at "The Poetics of Water", an exhibition organized in collaboration with DANAE, Paris, 2024.