Paul Pfeiffer
Jerusalem
Launching next week, online only at
www.artangel.org.uk/jerusalem
American artist Paul Pfeiffer’s Jerusalem is a radical reworking for the digital age of the 1966 World Cup Final between England and Germany.
The 1966 match at Wembley Stadium is probably the most famous occasion in England’s sporting history. It was broadcast live by the BBC to what was at the time, the largest ever audience for a global sporting event, with an estimated 400 million people watching on their black-and-white TV sets. Pfeiffer’s project has been designed specifically to be experienced online and premieres on digital art platform The Space whilst England is competing in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
Figures ghost on to the screen, fuse into each other and fade away like phantoms. The crowd comes in and out of view. Working with machine vision expert Brian Fulkerson, Pfeiffer has created a beguiling composition for a new digital field of play.
The sound of a cheering, chanting crowd is haunted by other voices from the time—bees buzzing, players talking, John Cage musing on silence and sound, Prime Minister Harold Wilson defending the pound. Jerusalem is an elegaic reflection on time, technology and memory, on the distance between a live experience and a mythologised past.
Pfeiffer and Fulkerson’s painterly treatment of the action on the screen brings a whole new meaning to the famous phrase uttered by TV commentator Ken Wolstenholme at the end of the match “They think it’s all over, it is now.”
Jerusalem is commissioned by Artangel and The Space.
