Paul Pfeiffer, Goethe's Message to the New Negroes, 2001

Paul Pfeiffer: It occurs to me that sports is something that's both extremely familiar, and ubiquitous in culture, maybe even increasingly so in the twenty-first century, and at the same time, it's something that exists within a very specific set of codes. And, not often do we focus on it, removed from that set of codes.

Narrator: Artist Paul Pfeiffer.

Paul Pfeiffer: The set of codes I'm referring to is, if you're a basketball fan, you're typically the fan of a very specific team, and it's either where you came from or where your parents came from, or where you went to school or you know, the team that has players that you adore. Whatever it is, there's an emotional investment.

What I was thinking of foremost was taking away the narrative of the game and all the trappings of the game, and just focusing on the abstract nature of the figure, sort of in this crazy architectural setting. And to further accentuate that, to basically frame by frame go and center the [figure] so that in the end the center remained relatively static, further to me accentuated the sense of strangeness of a figure, sort of trapped inside of this totally fantastic, futuristic, architectural environment.