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PAUL PFEIFFER:[br]I’ve always had an interest

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in domestic interiors that also

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are scenes of horror or of the uncanny.

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One of the most compelling [br]images when I was a teenager

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was the movie The Amityville Horror.

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In that movie, the stairway [br]plays a very important role.

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It’s the central corridor along [br]which a meeting of gazes occurs

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between the human inhabitants, the family, [br]and this nonhuman inhabitant, the Devil.

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That’s what led me to the idea of recreating [br]the central stairway in the house.

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So in the final piece, you really have two images—

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the large projection looking [br]from the top of the stairs

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down into the entrance coming through [br]a live feed from inside the diorama.

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And as you move close to the wall,

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you find a little hole with [br]light coming out of it.

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And looking through the hole, [br]you see the diorama itself.

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You find yourself looking [br]in the opposite direction

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from the bottom of the stairs [br]upward towards the second floor.

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Making images and objects,

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you can’t help but think about what it is

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you’re actually doing beyond merely fabrication.

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In a way, you’re really setting up relationships [br]between objects and images and people.

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I think of “Dutch Interior” as an [br]exploration of this kind of most basic

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and fundamental of relationships, [br]between oneself and another.

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There’s something really seductive [br]about pre-digested images.

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You’re served literally 500 [br]channels on TV, like why go out?

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There’s a huge infrastructure that undergirds [br]every individual image we see on TV,

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and for me it’s very hard to [br]dissociate the single, you know,

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image from that entire network.

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So the question always comes up, who’s using who?

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Is the image making us or do we make images?

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I'm really attracted to [br]images of amazing spectacle.

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That's one of the things that [br]brings me to the sports scene.

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Especially big events involving mass audiences

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but also things like newscasts, beauty [br]pageants, professional wrestling–

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all kinds of stuff.

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It seems that there’s something [br]inherently compelling about

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repetition and about the loop.

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You know, it’s like a fireplace, or [br]sort of like a moth to the flame,

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it’s just you know, something [br]that kind of draws you in.

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Makes you just want to kind [br]of stare at it for a while.

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I borrow so much of what I use.

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I think of myself much less as an author

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and more like a poacher or [br]a translator or a mediator.

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Last night was really quite unique,

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I’m actually advocating this as opposed [br]to dry footage from the television.

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Still in a way I feel like I'm [br]watching something like a TV image.

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And I'm watching material that [br]I've been working with already.

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The title “Fragment of a [br]Crucifixion” is a direct quote

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from a Francis Bacon painting from the fifties

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and like many of Francis [br]Bacon’s figures he’s screaming.

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And the question is screaming [br]why or because of what.

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I saw in that image of the basketball [br]player “Fragment” video figure again,

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surrounded sensorily by extreme situation,

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at the center of the attention of thousands [br]of people and under bright lights.

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And what that implies is a kind [br]of sense of the figure again

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dissolving into the accumulation of [br]capital until it becomes an image.

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Literally part of it is that [br]he just made a million dollars,

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but it also seems like a very [br]precarious position to be in.

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There is a kind of humiliation [br]in that process of simply

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becoming objects of admiration or [br]people simply becoming consumers.

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What led me to start working [br]on the “Long Count” pieces,

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where the boxer is erased from the ring,

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was a failure that I encountered when I [br]was working on “Fragment of a Crucifixion.”

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In that original scene there were [br]quite a few other players on the court

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so I removed the other [br]players, the basketball hoops

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and quite a few other details.

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And so I was going very slowly, frame by frame,

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trying to make sure that there [br]was kind of seamlessness to it.

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What I found was that there was [br]one particular figure in the image

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I could not get erasure of that figure.

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A few months later just looking back at it again

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I thought in a way there was [br]something really interesting

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and integral to the material ah,

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about that kind of evidence of the erasure.

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And, so I decided to try to do [br]another piece, “The Long Count,”

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that capitalized a bit more on this quality.

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And so that's what I think of in a way as craft.

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Building a relationship to the material,

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discovering the things that it [br]will do despite your will that

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may end up being more interesting then what [br]you were trying to will the material to do.

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I would happily sit in my [br]room and do this work all day—

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it’s a bit like meditation.

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I also feel like it’s a bit [br]like painting or drawing,

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in the sense that you leave your everyday kind of

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consciousness of the world and [br]achieve a certain kind of focus.[br]

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“Morning After the Deluge” is a direct [br]quote from a painting by Turner.

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It refers to, this investigation of [br]a perceptual phenomenon in nature

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and also has a biblical reference,

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since the “Morning After the [br]Deluge” is the story of Noah’s ark.

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So if you really think about it,

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it’s the morning after the [br]complete annihilation of the world.

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These days it’s quite idealistic [br]to think of the viewer

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as being anything but distracted given [br]the kind of image-saturated world

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that people function in.

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In the “Morning After the Deluge,”

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you have to be there for at [br]least the first few minutes

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if not for the full 20 [br]minutes to see the full loop

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and to get the full sense of [br]the sun rising and setting.

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In a way, it’s not very viewer-friendly.

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The shot is in real time—

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it almost looks like nothing’s happening.

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You really have to kind of stand for a while

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to get the sense that the sun [br]is slowly setting and rising.

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In the meantime though, there’s a [br]lot of other action that’s happening

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on a much smaller scale.

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You have birds flying very [br]quickly through the screen.

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It’s almost at like a pixeled level, [br]barely there at all but projected big.

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This is something you get to see—

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this is maybe what you enter [br]in on as a moving image,

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but as you sit with it a while longer,

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the bigger movements become [br]more accessible to you.

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I like to think that there might be [br]someway to create something that,

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you could take something away from it even [br]if you’re only there for, like a fraction.

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If you’re asking yourself, ‘is [br]there anything beyond television?’

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you could turn off the television and go outside,

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but I think what’s more interesting [br]for an artist is to attempt

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to answer that question through an [br]exploration of the media itself.

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And I’m attempting to answer it through [br]a kind of creation of the illusion.