David Schafer (born 1955) is an American visual and sound artist based in Los Angeles, whose practice integrates aural, textual, graphic and sculptural elements to create installations, public art and individual works that critics describe as immersive, spatial experiments.

[15][16][13] Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes his work as a "heady jumble" producing collisions, contradictions and convergences at the intersection of architecture, sound, sculpture, language and theory in order to "disrupt communication intentionally, incisively, through strategies of fragmentation and interruption.

[17] He pursued graduate studies at the University of Texas, earning an MFA in Sculpture (1983) and minor in Mechanical Engineering; interdisciplinary work there with Peter Saul, Robert Yarber, and visiting professors John Baldessari, Vito Acconci and Siah Armajani influenced his understanding of the built world and use of social critique and humor.

[5] Schafer's early art explored relationships between public and private space and perception through site-specific works that implicated sculpture as a staged experience and disrupted exhibition/audience and viewer/art object conventions, often through physical engagement.

[39][37][15] The installation reflected on the complexities and contradictions of liberty, juxtaposing the rote memorization, oversimplification, and commodification endemic to American patriotic discourse with the site's commemoration of revolutionary thought, speech and action.

[40][16][41] Challenging in their 19th-century language, ideas and context and bold, utilitarian design—which ran counter to typical, decorative signage—the signs sought to restore the hidden narratives in Olmsted's vision revealing the gap between his lofty intentions and present-day park usage.

[42][16][43][41] Critic Arlene Raven situated the work in the Community Arts tradition, observing that it "invites reflections on the future possibilities of peace embedded in an enduring heritage of past ideals," while also partaking in the "stormy entanglements" of contemporary public life, in this case, some resistance and confusion among park-goers.

[22][45][13] The work's production and restaging of organic form outside the convalescent facility alludes to the colonization of the body in both art (e.g., Moore's abstract, biomorphic notion of "Vitalism") and the medical industry's technological gaze.

[17][36] Schafer has performed sound at LACE, Human Resources and David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, and Printed Matter, Inc., Silent Barn, The Invisible Dog Art Center and Roulette in New York, among other venues.

[8] For his two-CD collection, x10R.1–x1-R.2, Schafer re-sequenced ten easy-listening records and superimposed them on top of one another to create a dense, cacophonous blanket of non-stop sound that reviewers described as a disorienting, "seething musical Frankenstein"[49] revealing the repressive and coercive side of Muzak.