In today's complex world, in which we are routinely overburdened with data, intuition and a visceral response to imagery is increasingly trumping rational discourse, according to Thomas Demand. But this is something the German artist, whose work is the subject of a major solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, welcomes.
"I'm an optimist on that," he says by phone from Bavaria in Germany, where he has just pulled off the road to talk to the Japan Times. "Instead of the dumbing down that people predicted, we see how capable we are of actually handling the unbelievable amount of information and also how quickly we adapt."
An increasing amount of the information he is referring to is visual. This is also the starting point of his art, in which he photographs 3-D, paper recreations of scenes from photographs once published in the media, and then destroys the paper models. This unusual art form raises interesting questions about the way we process information, virtualization and the nature of reality itself.