With his current retrospective, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles&ndash;he exposes the manipulation behind popular imagery to poke holes in our systems of veneration and objectification.

An otherworldly halo seems to emanate from celebrities who wear the sheen of invisible pores and immaculate teeth. Filtered or not, such beauty standards cause distress because many are hoodwinked that it&rsquo;s the only way to live. But there&rsquo;s no stopping the proliferation of manipulated images and the mass worship it generates. Thus Paul Pfeiffer&rsquo;s career-defining artistic inquiry stands to this day&mdash;&ldquo;Who&rsquo;s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?&rdquo;
Working in the field of video, photography, sculpture, and sound&mdash;Pfeiffer is drawn to places that serve as a platform for the mass audience. Whether it be a boxing ring, stadium, or basketball court, every setting takes on a new life under Pfeiffer&rsquo;s observant eye. In Vitruvian Figure, he creates a large sculptural installation inspired by the Sydney Olympic Stadium. It&rsquo;s a study on how contained environments reflect greater social constructs and their ability to control a population. Meanwhile, in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he erases contextual details in archival NBA photographs to highlight the hysteria surrounding superstar athletes depicted as solitary figures.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii and raised in both the Philippines and the US, Pfeiffer teeters between cultures to build commonality among media consumers. It&rsquo;s a vantage yet vulnerable position allowing him to toe the line between voyeurism and contemplation.
In this interview with L&rsquo;Officiel, hear Pfeiffer talk about his years of practice and his advice on how to remain vigilant when the only option for survival is to navigate technology's hall of mirrors.

Tell me more about your show.
It&rsquo;s a retrospective. It&rsquo;s a survey of about 25 years of work, mostly video installations and large-scale sculpture installations or video on sound. It&rsquo;s happening at the Geffen Contemporary, which is really an amazing space. Part of it is borrowing works from different collectors and public institutions in the US and Europe. For example, there&rsquo;s a piece called the Vitruvian Figure, which is a large-scale model of a stadium holding a million seats.
You once said that advertising is messing with people on a subliminal level especially in the age of social media. How messed up do you think are we?
I use social media as much as the next person. I&rsquo;m sure you do, too. It&rsquo;s good and bad. I think in some ways, it&rsquo;s like learning a new language and how to use a new technology. But the way that social media has affected the circulation of information, news, fake news, and political views&mdash;there&rsquo;s a general sense of uncertainty about what to trust in terms of information that&rsquo;s immediately on your horizon. It&rsquo;s not just how we consume information but how it affects relationships like social bonding or the ways we live together. I would say it&rsquo;s a hall of mirrors. The possibility of people using the confusion from nefarious ads is extreme.
What stands out for me about your work is the psychological aspect of being manipulated by the media. Do you find yourself likewise manipulated among the general population?&nbsp;
I&rsquo;m participating in the field of communication and information exchange. I&rsquo;m a consumer and also a generator of image formation. I would go back to this idea that in some ways, it&rsquo;s a matter of being adept at the ways we communicate now. As a video editor or as a maker of images, from even before the start of social media, I&rsquo;ve been fascinated with how images can be reused, collaged, and combined to mean other things. I like the term code-switching. This is really a field of invention. I often feel manipulated, and I question if I&rsquo;m being manipulated, but I would say more often, that I feel a sense of excitement about being a participant in culture. What I do as an artist is about shooting for the highest level of participation in engaging with the way information circulates these days.
Have your subjects ever seen your work like Pacquiao?
I don&rsquo;t know because I haven&rsquo;t been in touch with him directly... but it&rsquo;s fascinating to see what people see in the images, and using a figure like Pacquiao can mean so many different things to so many different people. It&rsquo;s a figure that is already saturated with meaning. I like to create something by simply changing it slightly in a way that intensifies an image.

With a large-scale show on the horizon, do you look forward to being a part of the spectacle yourself? Would you rather consume or be consumed? I think they go hand in hand. I&rsquo;m certainly excited to be able to have the opportunity to have the chance to show my work on such a public platform like LA MOCA. There are even plans to display some of my videos on billboards across the city. So, it&rsquo;s not just the museum, but it&rsquo;s the whole context of LA, which is a scene of intense image production and invention. I&rsquo;m excited to be part of this spectacle and, in a way, to reflect on the city.
You often travel. How has geography influenced your work? Can you share your observations about the Filipinos&rsquo; love for spectacles? I think the energy of a place like Manila matches the intensity of a city like New York. There&rsquo;s a real culture of aspiration&mdash;of wanting to be there. People come to the city so there&rsquo;s a sense of people being drawn to the crowd and to participate or exchange ideas. At the same time, it&rsquo;s intense in the extremes of disparity and the competitive nature of their environments. In cities like Manila and cities in Europe or the US or South America, the energy is intense.
As far as the Philippines goes, the history of the place entails a real exchange of cultures so that you&rsquo;d have this rich layering. As circumstances change, mixing culture reminds me of sampling&mdash;the way people play with images and materials whether musically through movement and the construction of things. That reminds me of what I am trying to achieve when I make images and edit them.
I love the idea of cultural sampling. That said, I checked your Instagram feed where you took photos of billboards. Oh, yes. I find them so fascinating&mdash;just the scale of them.
It&rsquo;s also interesting that it&rsquo;s still the number one platform in the streets of the Philippines. Most of the time, it shows a giant printed face. Right, that&rsquo;s so cool. There&rsquo;s like a physical dimension to it like a monumentality.
Did you grow up in the Philippines?
I was born in Hawaii. I spent time in the Philippines growing up in Negros, Dumaguete City. My family was going back and forth a lot. They were teachers at Silliman University. My dad was a musicologist&mdash;studying indigenous music in the Philippines, particularly in Mindanao. Both were involved in the collection and presentation of folk music. I grew up within a musical culture and the production of music in a religious setting. My parents were church musicians.

Did that influence your penchant for religious motifs?
Absolutely. My experience of art and music is that it&rsquo;s made to communicate widely to the general public. Although I appreciate the more esoteric dimension of poetry and art-making, ultimately, I&rsquo;m attracted to the idea of speaking in a common language.
I&rsquo;m intrigued by the idea that you find media apocalyptic. Do you think media or technology is a linear progression or more like a loop?
Wow, I love your question. I think what we're doing has to do with the evolution of consciousness or an evolution of the way we live.
Below the surface, technology changing our perceptions is an age-old function. It&rsquo;s going somewhere but I don&rsquo;t necessarily think it&rsquo;s going somewhere linear.
It&rsquo;s a spiral. In some ways, what technology is doing is bringing us back, maybe just to some of the most ancient questions.
You think like a psychologist or philosopher. Are they a major influence?
I&rsquo;m interested in psychology to the extent that after graduate school, I purposefully submitted myself to programs like the Whitney program where there&rsquo;s an intensive study of everything from 20th-century psychology to the history of political thought and phenomenology. All these things fascinate me. I think of art as a field that can be a creative laboratory.

Why don&rsquo;t you believe in nationalist narratives? That struck me.
I think of nationalism as a kind of inherited story. At any given moment, there&rsquo;s a kind of accepted story about who we are as a society and even who we are as individuals. I think that&rsquo;s necessary. Go back to advertising; the business of storytelling is tied to patterns of consumption and monetizing human behavior.
There&rsquo;s a pervading inquiry about how history is being framed in the current moment and there are reasons why people want to revise history. It brings legitimacy to people who were in power. Nationalist narratives are a perfect example of that process&mdash;normalizing a certain story in a way that makes it seem like it&rsquo;s been that way forever, and it's never going to change, and therefore, things should be done in a way that maintains relations the way they are. My interest is to just really cut through that to show how, in fact, the ways that we live together, the language we use, how we interact&mdash;they&rsquo;re all malleable. This is a creative process. The thing about questioning nationalist narratives is that it&rsquo;s just calling into question the process of construction so that we don&rsquo;t forget our capacity to shape things in the present.
Do you think your work has become more complex because you deal with media that has become more complex?
It becomes more layered. We&rsquo;re very quick now to read between the lines. Even from a short video, you immediately see beyond the obvious and catch some nuance, and they reverse the meaning or turn it into something else and make it funny. We&rsquo;re very adept at reading through layers.
What can you say about nostalgia? Many things are no longer printed and exist only as screenshots. Do you think that factors in the malleability of how truth is manipulated?
If you look at the first generation of Instagram filters, in some ways, we can identify them as having a vibe from the early 2000s. The new kind of AI-generated images have a specific vibe to them. In the same way, we have nostalgia for certain qualities or textures that no longer exist. What constitutes the past is becoming shorter and shorter. Things from 20 years ago already feel like they&rsquo;re antique. I think it relates to sampling in the end. Potentially, radical things are the ones that we can&rsquo;t even tell have been manipulated.
You&rsquo;ve compared the technology of media to regimes. Who is our next overlord? Is it AI?
I have this idea that really good poetry is something that can rewire your brain. Linguistically, it&rsquo;s like creating new memories or new associations. If the regime we&rsquo;re in now is rewiring our brains, then I think it&rsquo;s an open-ended process. I think there&rsquo;s a real competition to monetize people&rsquo;s behavior to control people and make money. We&rsquo;ve got to be careful about what we consume.

Filipino-American Artist Paul Pfeiffer Holds Retrospective Exhibition at MOCA

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