Animal Charm is the American duo of sound and media artists Richard Bott (b. 1972) and Jim Fetterley (b. 1971), who have made video collage from found and discarded footage since 1995. Working from bins of dead media — industrial and promotional videos, bargain vinyl LPs, consumer electronics — they combine disparate footage into unsettling, often humorous works that subvert the source material.
They call their approach “Electronic Civil Disobedience”: culling footage from the dumpsters of video production companies, then re-editing it, at times in live mix performances. The process scrambles media codes into what they describe as a kind of convulsive babble that disrupts conventional forms. The duo trace their work to an online community concerned with recycled media, citing touchstones such as John Oswald's Plunderphonics and the project Stock, Hausen & Walkman.
Lightfoot Fever (1996) pairs a singing-saw soundtrack with images of frolicking lambs and galloping horses. Their video Ashley (1997) unsettles a conventional story about a modern wife and mother by inserting incongruous soap opera scenes. These pieces, along with Slow Gin Soul Stallion, Stuffing and Working Together, were compiled into Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1 (1998), described as upsetting the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing and revealing the underbelly of corporate message-making.A 2008 work, Edge-TV with Animal Charm, was described in Artforum as a montage of “'90s video wrongness” punctuated by a clip from the film Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.
The critic Gavin Smith of the New York Video Festival called their tapes “mind-bendingly inventive experiments in uncanny, surreal montage that defy logical analysis”.In 2012 the duo took part in “Made in LA”, a biennial organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.They presented a dedicated show at China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles in 2014.In 2023, ARTnews described a younger artist's internet-collage work as recalling the tradition of Animal Charm and the project Negativland.
