[1] According to his fictitious biography, Johann Dieter Wassmann was born in Leipzig, where he witnessed the Industrial Revolution rapidly alter the once agrarian, guild-based and perhaps idealized Electorate of Saxony.

In portraying his character as fearful of a less humanitarian world—ill at ease with the changing roles of science, medicine, religion, education, cosmology and time—the artist challenges the viewer to share in the conflicts and anxieties of this ubiquitous thinker.

The construction of Johann Dieter Wassmann trades heavily on the aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notion of suspension of disbelief to justify the use of certain fantastic or non-realistic elements.

Coleridge asserts that if the author can bring a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader/viewer will withhold judgement on any improbability that might normally render the story doubtful, a contention the artist is reliant on for his audience to fully engage.

As a lecturer at the University of Leipzig, we experience him prompting students to fully explore the creative process, concerned as he is at the decline of liberal education.

As a cabinetmaker in Weimar, his father's clients soon include Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, among others, in what becomes a Grand Tour through 19th-century Germany's music, art, literary and academic elites.

In 1881, six years into his post, Johann sets out to challenge his engineering students through construction of boxed assemblage works enigmatically addressing medical and scientific themes that he feels go unresolved through traditional lecture practices.

[7] His growing angst at what he sees as the encroachment of modernity causes him to begin a second, more personal series of boxes, escaping into a romanticized view of a pre-modern Saxony, much of it set in the ancient wood of Goethe and amidst the hopeful spectre of the American Transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

As the Newtonian perception of a clockwork universe merges with the force of social Darwinism he recognizes that the rising mantra of "progress" has now split the world into two distinct entities: time and space.

"[9] In Planck, Johann discovers a friend and colleague dedicated to the pursuit of a non-Newtonian world-view in which the linear nature of absolute time and space will dissolve into one of a multidimensional universe free of the strictures of past, present and future.

Much like Woody Allen's fictional 1920s character Leonard Zelig, Johann Dieter Wassmann finds himself caught up in this cacophony of ideas, theories and movements, allowing him to take an active part in one of the great revolutions of the modern era.

[15] As a predecessor to his fellow countrymen Heinrich Zille[16] and August Sander,[17] Johann discreetly anticipates what vast potential the photographic arts holds for the coming age.

[20] In the late 1990s, the artist Walid Raad began constructing elaborate fictions chronicling the contemporary history of his native Lebanon, signing his work The Atlas Group and presenting it as a body of collective scholarship.

[25] Since that time, the artist has created a rival institution vying to have the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann repatriated to Germany: MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.

We catch a glimpse of this angst, as expressed by the sewerage engineer protagonist, before losing clarity to the mounting failures of the 20th and now 21st-centuries, distorting our anxieties beyond recognition.

For artists and individuals in what were formerly the planet's outer reaches, Wassmann has seen the web democratize access to the structures and machinations of power to an extent previously unimagined.

While projects such as Wassmann's function on a relatively benign level, he believes the realigned power structures they allude to allow individuals outside the arts to masterfully, and often frighteningly, alter the real world irretrievably.