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.
