Martin Lenclos

Our content is shaped by real people—deeply curious thinkers and teachers. Here are the stories behind and inspired by Waking Up.

Guest Editor | Member Since 2024

Martin Lenclos

Martin Lenclos is the founder of L’Enclos, an independent studio-lab developing design-led perception experiments across artworks, design objects, installations, and participatory field studies. Through L’Enclos, he publishes ongoing studio and field projects and a newsletter on perception and decision-making. He is an incoming CIIS PhD student in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.

“Perception is the first creative act.”

Martin Lenclos

A Note From the Artist

Experiments in Perception

The work was shaped by a method I call Design for Nothing—an approach grounded in non-attachment, reduction, and a willingness not to force meaning too quickly. The method draws on contemplative principles I’ve long worked with, but in practice it functions very simply: Remove what feels imposed, stay with what remains alive, and let form emerge from sustained attention rather than from concept alone. In that sense, contemplative attention does not just influence the message of the painting; it changes the conditions under which the image is allowed to appear. — Martin Lenclos

Emptiness Unveiled

We spend much of life filling forms—roles, ambitions, names, preferences, stories about what must be protected or achieved. The forms differ, but the movement is familiar: to take shape as solidity. What draws me to emptiness is not negation, but relief—the possibility that identity can be held more lightly because form was never the whole truth of it. These vessels, developed in continuity with my Jacob Vase series, suggest the countless ways life presents itself, and the weight of what gathers when we mistake those forms for what we are. Emptiness, here, is not absence. It is what allows forms to appear without having to imprison what moves through them, or block the entrance to a wider awareness.

Canopy of Consciousness

The mind’s weather changes constantly; awareness remains the quieter question beneath it. Practice often feels less like acquiring something new than returning beneath that noise to what has been quietly present throughout. A sustained path depends not only on insight, but on conditions that support remembrance: books, teachers, repetition, and, in my own work, designs, practices, and visual signposts that help hold the return. Growth matters, but perhaps what deepens most is our familiarity with the simple awareness that was never absent, an inquiry also carried by LeafHead, where speaking from behind a simple leaf loosens identity and tests whether mind can feel less private than it first appears.

Paths of Awakening

Awakening can seem less like a single staircase than a proliferation of entries, returns, reversals, partial clearings, and strange continuities that only later appear to belong to the same movement. What interests me here is not progress as ascent, but the possibility that perception keeps more than one architecture of attention open at once. Some paths feel chosen, others discovered only after resistance. Rather than looking for a final route, I’m interested in the possibility that awareness may have more doors than the mind first assumes, even as the table and stool quietly extend my Paradox of the Typical Atypical Device inquiry into perceived stability, function, and first judgment.

The Body Vessel

An inquiry into consciousness begins to soften certainties, but the obstacles are many. The body can make individuality feel unquestionable—one bounded form moving among other bounded forms. Sensation, breathing, and physical pain are intimate enough that they are not easily ignored. Thought rushes in to defend, interpret, compare, and protect, turning bodily fragility into a defended identity. What interests me in the vessel on the sill is this tension: the body as threshold rather than prison, as something through which light, world, influence, and vulnerability pass. The work is not to deny embodiment, but to notice when the mind turns a living aperture into a defended self.

Digital Wallpaper

These paintings were not made simply to illustrate teachings, but to prolong their pressure: to turn concepts like awakening, emptiness, no-self, and awareness into visual situations that continue working on perception after the screen is closed.

Click each image to download wallpaper.

By Martin Lenclos

My meditation practice was a return to the drawing board, in some ways.

I was first drawn to contemplative traditions around the age of 7 or 8, though I didn’t recognize it as such until much later. My father was a designer, not a full-time artist, and he made art on weekends and during our long summer vacations. I would sit with him and paint, and I realized only recently that it was, for him, a mindfulness practice.

He taught me how to paint—to look at what I was seeing and translate what I was feeling onto the painting. I can see now how that experience has shaped my perception both about the nature of creative practice and about the nature of mind. Over time, my painting became less about communicating a specific idea and more about seeing clearly.

Outside of that, I became interested in meditation about 15 years ago, while reading texts on near-death experiences following the passing of my mother. It was a practice and curiosity that grew organically, and it was really rooted in a desire to slow down. At the time, I was working in start-ups and recognized that I was not going to be able to process my emotions while also working in a high-pressure environment. So, after a decade in tech, I quit.

It wasn’t until the COVID-19 lockdowns that I truly started to meditate. By that, I mean engaging in the practice without also needing to be painting or drawing. That’s when I started to meditate without also needing a tool or some sort of output.

In my work, I’m no longer interested in creating solutions or products.

I’m much more focused on exploring gestures and intentionality instead of utility. I think a lot about negation, or the opposite of what we think art and design have to be.

I want to create forms that function more like questions than statements, and create interventions that pull people out of their comfort zone while simultaneously allowing me to observe and learn from their reactions.

My favorite example of this is a piece called Paradox of the Typical Atypical Chair, No. 1, which is a chair that’s meant to look broken yet is functional and can support over 300 pounds. I showed it at a furniture fair and was able to interact with people as they worriedly asked if it had been damaged in transport. We’d talk about it and I would ultimately tell them that it’s engineered to be that way.

I translate this idea into field tests that function as an art practice. In everyday events, I capture the moments where I choose to perceive things differently. Through this, instead of seeing the world as causing or containing an event, my perception shifts to my mind being the cause and the world happening in my mind. There’s no separation between the world and the mind, which is the core premise of nonduality.

My interventions are similar to certain Surrealist and Dada strategies: using dislocation, absurdity, ordinary objects, and unstable meanings to challenge habit, logic, and the first reading of reality. It’s not in-your-face or radical, but it works indirectly, asking viewers to pause before meaning settles too quickly. And, importantly, it’s presented as a game or an experiment. I don’t want to be telling anyone what the truth about reality is.

Waking Up has been a meaningful companion to this longer inquiry. Sam’s work and the app’s multi-disciplinary, non-dogmatic approach have resonated with the part of my practice that is more interested in experimenting and testing hypotheses than in believing one thing or another.

Over time, I came to see Waking Up as more than a meditation app.

It’s a path you can take to discover more about the nature of the mind without getting distracted by metaphysical concepts and spiritual dogma. It met me at a point in my work where perception had already become central, especially the idea that perception is the first creative act.

I realized that an artist and designer can explore the mind in a way that’s just as valuable as the work of a neuroscientist or biologist. This collaboration gave me a precise context for something I had already been exploring: art and design as tools for investigating mind and consciousness. For me, that means treating perception itself as part of the material: not only what an image shows, but what it asks the viewer to notice, assume, resist, or reframe.

The painted images I created for Waking Up are shaped by a method I call “Design for Nothing,” which is grounded in non-attachment and a resistance to forcing meaning. With this, contemplative attention does not simply influence the subject of the images; it changes the conditions under which they are allowed to appear.

Martin Lenclos

Martin’s Playlist

Martin curated a playlist that complements and helped inspire the collaboration, offering another way to notice what is shaping a moment before thought, reaction, and identity take over.

Artwork by Martin Lenclos

The Visual Learner

William B. Irvine, Henry Shukman, Sam Harris, and more

Question first impressions, see beyond the obvious, and cultivate creative perception.

Listen Now

More About Martin Lenclos

With an MA from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and early projects involving MoMA and the Museum of the Moving Image, Martin spent years building media, product, and startup ventures before turning that same design logic toward the study of perception. He has spoken at NYU, Columbia, and New Museum, and is scheduled to speak at Harvard Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality conference.

Rather than treating images, objects, and interfaces as final outcomes, Martin approaches them as perception experiments: ways of testing how attention, identity, trust, and the first reading of reality are framed. At L’Enclos, he leads a research project on what changes when consciousness is treated as primary, and he keeps an independent public record of the ongoing inquiry. For occasional notes on perception, practice, and The Dreamer Project, subscribe here.

Website:

lenclos.org

Instagram:

@lenclosorg

Go Deeper with Waking Up

Waking Up is more than a meditation app. It's a gateway to a deeper understanding of yourself and to a new way of being in the world. Through guided meditations, lessons, and conversations with leading teachers and scholars, Waking Up presents the best of ancient wisdom and modern knowledge about the art of living well.