Farocki, writing in Artforum, described the creation of In Comparison: “I wanted to make a film about concomitance and about contemporary production on a range of different technical levels. So I looked for an object that had not changed too much in the past few thousand years. This could have been a shoe or a knife, but a brick becomes part of a building and therefore part of our environment. So the brick appears as something of a poetic object.”