Marcel Duchamp, the supreme artist's artist, was often asked about his role in the making of art. The line of inquiry was inspired largely by the enigmatic Frenchman's series of "ready-mades," store-bought objects such as shovels or coat racks he exhibited under his name.

Duchamp is said to have an- swered critics of his seemingly detached approach by replying that it was not necessary to roll up one's sleeves in order to create. "The artist of the future," he predicted, "will simply point his finger."

"Karin Sander 1:10, 3-D body scan of the original person"

Some of that future has now arrived in Tokyo with Karin Sander, who is showing new work at Gallery Koyanagi in Ginza. The 43-year-old German artist has brought a series of whole-body sculptures of people, but the funny thing is, Sander doesn't sculpt, exactly.

What Sander does do is coordinate teams of technicians and some new technology to produce 1:10 scale reproductions of her subjects. There are about 30 of the sculptures here, each standing in its own glass display case and perched atop its own minimal plinth, a smart little army they resemble, of plastic action figures.

Two machines make these miniatures possible. The first, a 3-D scanner, uses 16 laser cameras positioned at various heights in a unit the size of a big shower cabinet. The cameras read and record body surface dimensions. The machine, used mainly in the fashion industry, does a complete scan of a normal-size person wearing normal clothing in about 20 seconds.

What Sander does next is input the data from the 3-D scanner into an extruder, which is a machine used in the manufacturing industries to build prototypes. In the extruder, 0.01-mm layers of ABS plastic are built up one after the other to give physical form to the data. The resulting figures are then airbrushed in the colors of the clothing the subjects were wearing when scanned, and this completes the process.

Although Sander has experimented with nudes, she says she prefers scanning people in their clothes.

"A nude is traditional," she notes, "but I think that with clothing the pieces are much more individual -- what clothing the person chooses to wear, the way the person stands and how the clothes fall and wrinkle."

The pieces are an aesthetic delight, the size neither so small as to make details difficult to see, nor so large as to make the sculptures appear too doll-like. The extruder leaves its mark on each piece, in the form of hundreds of tiny ridges ringing the circumferences. These lines suggest the calculated and unsympathetic severity found in digital imagery, but otherwise, the works are eerily human.

There are a number of famous people reproduced here (Thomas Ruff from the art world, professional football players and so on), but most of the subjects are people Sander meets in her daily life, and there is nothing visually striking about them. The artist doesn't go out of her way to find mohawk hairdos or whatever.

As such, there is a bit of a voyeuristic thing going on here. One can examine the posture, clothing and even the bodies of strangers, and one is free to stare as long as one wants.

Although the art world today regards the camera as a tool and accepts mechanical or digital reproductions as works of art, it is certain that many traditional artists would bristle at the suggestion that Sander's work is sculpture. The problem is that Sander does not seem to be doing anything to interpret her subjects, instead letting the machines she uses do an objective reproduction.

In the back of the Koyanagi and out in the street among the smokers, there is more than a little grumbling from purists about Sander's hands-off approach. The rude old "But is it art?" question is even heard, and nobody ever asks that at gallery openings.

But the artist doesn't seem in the least concerned.

"What I do to add to or interpret the subjects is nothing," she says. "This is art because I use a new technology, and I use it in a way that hasn't been done before and is specific to my work. That is my concept, in this work the artist does not do any interpretation, the machine does."