PROGRAMS
Talks, Installations, & Shared Experiments
Making philosophical questions experientially present.
Formats
Artist-designer Martin Lenclos creates situations in which questions of perception, design, consciousness, and identity can be entered, observed, and discussed.
Talks
15-90 minutes
Image-led talks combine philosophical inquiry with perception experiments that invite audiences to observe the mind at work and ordinary life as a field for perceiving differently. In panels, Lenclos brings a design-led, experiential perspective to theoretical conversations.
A focused artist talk can also trace 30 years of work, from painting and photography to virtual worlds, media arts, apps, installations, furniture, and design objects.
Installations
Site-responsive works
Objects, images, prompts, and environments that make a question perceptible through direct encounter. Existing works may be presented independently or adapted in relation to an exhibition, gathering, or institutional setting.
The painted mises-en-scène Contours of Impermanence and the Board Rooms offer reference points for these spatial and site-responsive possibilities.
Shared Experiments
Participatory sessions
Designed situations in which participants observe how an object, identity, creative brief, or ordinary event has already been interpreted. These may include perception exercises, unresolved propositions, speculative design, and alternative readings developed into small experiments.
For art and design schools, the format may extend into a studio session developed in response to the course, students, and questions being explored.
Areas of Inquiry & Possible Subjects
Perception & the First Reading
How attention, expectation, memory, identity, and context organize experience before conscious reflection, and how interrupting that first reading can alter judgment, agency, and response.
· Observation and interpretation
· Perception before judgment
· Trust, defect, risk, and value in objects
· How first readings shape decisions, conflict, and relation
Art & Design as Philosophical Method
How artworks, objects, interfaces, and participatory situations can turn abstract questions into conditions that can be encountered, tested, and discussed.
· Witness objects and self-questioning devices
· Perception as artistic material
· Speculative and deliberately unresolved design
· Prototyping philosophical questions
Ordinary Life as Philosophical Experiment
How philosophical and contemplative premises, including the hypothesis that consciousness may be primary, can be translated into practices, constraints, field tests, and structured observation without treating subjective change as metaphysical proof.
· What experience can and cannot establish
· The Dreamer Project and first-person and practice-based research
· Designed conditions, assignments, and logging
· Ordinary life as a site of inquiry
Identity, Relation & Shared Reality
How shifts in perception alter the felt boundaries between self, other, and world, and what those shifts may mean for belonging, conflict, conduct, and repair.
· We The Dreamer, nondual philosophy without religious authority
· Belonging, othering, and repair
· Individual and shared readings of reality
· Self, other, and relational perception
Across these areas, the work distinguishes experiential change from metaphysical proof and treats ambiguity, ethical limits, interpretive framing, and the possibility of no effect as part of the inquiry.
The First Reading Is Not
the Final Truth
Excerpt from Martin Lenclos’s presentation for Vision Lab Collective, July 15, 2026.
A presentation on perception as a creative act, using artworks, design objects, and ordinary situations to test how first readings can be interrupted and revised.