Thomas Demand

Unless you’re familiar with his work, it isn’t immediately obvious whether Thomas Demand’s photographs are of a real or a constructed world. His creations so closely approximate reality, it’s hard to be sure. Demand carefully reconstructs real scenarios from paper and card, removing any direct signs of human occupation. He then photographs the life-sized model and destroys it.

Demand’s photography is unassuming, so when it catches you, it does so by surprise. It starts you questioning the fibre and function of other aspects of your environment. If strangeness lurks in such quiet, small and unassuming ways, then perhaps it is all around me. Perhaps I need to look a little closer. I must remain alert.

An Oak Tree

There was a minor movement in poetry called Martian Poetry, which sought to ‘break the grip of the familiar’ by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways – the world described as if through the eyes of a Martian. Poet Craig Raine describes the act of reading a book, as if observing this strange act for the first time:

mechanical birds with many wings
perch on the hand
cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain

In An Oak Tree (pictured), artist Michael Craig-Martin attempts to jolt our conception of the world by telling us that “an oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water.” His assertion forces us to come to terms with a violent disjunct between what we see and what we’re told.

These ideas hold interesting lessons for the designer who seeks to make visible those aspects of our lives rendered invisible by habits of behaviour.

Such concerns are present in the work of the Psychogeographers who, in the 1950’s, described their endeavours as “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”