Paul Pfeiffer

Paul Pfeiffer’s digital media works in computer-based videos, photographs, and sculptures alter and refigure mass-media spectacles of all kinds, from erasing Muhammed Ali from video clips of three of his most famous fights to doubling a brief clip of a dancing Michael Jackson in a piece palindromically entitled Live Evil. The works remind us of how technology has become so deeply embedded in our mass media and individual consciousness. In a series of pieces that recreate sets of props from Hollywood terror films such as The Exorcist or The Amityville Horror, Pfeiffer reconstructs scenes in which domesticity is infiltrated by the paranormal. Here, Poltergeist 2000 is based on a scene from the 1986 Spielberg film of the same name, where an entity rearranges the kitchen chairs into an eerily beautiful pyramid. Pfeiffer translated this scene using 3-D modeling software into digital code and printed it in a stereolithographic process whereby a laser fuses together plastic powder in layers. Two years later Pfeiffer asked craftsmen in Thailand to carve the same object in wax, a former student in New York to weave it out of grass, and a prison inmate in New Mexico to sculpt it out of toilet paper. Endlessly doubling from a fictional original, the Poltergeist series takes an American vernacular spectacle of haunted domesticity and releases it into other social registers, where paradoxically individual handwork refashions the digital. The original exchange in the film between the ghost and the mother, between the ordinary and the supernatural, is shifted out of its filmic context to rupture technology’s apparently seamless and endless duplication of the self.

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