Kalen Iwamoto, photo courtesy of the artist.
Join us for a boundary-pushing evening of experimental poetry and prose at this Literary Cabaret, sharing works from the Computational Writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Across three nights, explore writing that is at once strangely familiar and radically new, created and performed by participants and faculty mentors.
This one-and-a-half-week residency unites writers and artists interrogating how technology, code, and artificial intelligence can be used as ethical, creative tools for producing new poetry and prose. The goal isn’t to replace human creativity, but to reimagine authorship, language, and form through collaboration with machines.
This chapter is hosted by Kalen Iwamoto, an internationally recognized conceptual artist and pioneer of blockchain and NFT poetics. She is the co-founder of the digital poetry gallery and collective theVERSEverse.
Enjoy a drink from the bar and immerse yourself in a playful literary setting. Doors open at 6:15 p.m., with readings starting at 7 p.m. Afterward, mingle with the writers and faculty until 9:30 p.m.
Don’t miss this chance to discover poems generated by algorithms, stories shaped by code, and more.
Literary Arts is generously supported by the Flanagan Foundation and Fondation David R. Graham.
About Kalen Iwamoto
Kalen Iwamoto
Kalen Iwamoto is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice explores the shifting boundaries of language, art, and technology. A pioneer in blockchain poetics, she is the co-founder of the digital poetry gallery and collective, theVERSEverse. In 2022, she joined forces with her partner Julien Silvano to create Wen New, an art, language and technology atelier that explores the liminal spaces between genres, media, and disciplines. The duo has created book-objects, paintings based on procedural writing, and literary machines and poetic devices, like the Couple Machine and Miniscriber, a conceptual poetry synth. Rooted in conceptual writing, Oulipo, and digital poetics, Kalen’s work often engages critically and playfully with emerging technologies, offering new ways of relating to language through both digital and physical forms. Her pieces have been exhibited internationally, including in Paris, New York, Budapest, Berlin, Tokyo, and beyond. Born in Canada, of Japanese heritage, and based in France, her practice is shaped by experiences of cultural and linguistic in-betweenness.