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Ashley

Animal Charm

1997 00:09:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Chicago Art, Culture Jamming, Found Footage, Media Analysis

Description

Animal Charm's Ashley seems to develop a conventional story about a modern mother and wife with typically modern desires. But the insertion of incongruous soap opera scenes soon ensures that the seductive images take on an absurd and oppressive charge. “The antiseptic cleanliness of the imagery has a superficial appeal, but begins to feel claustrophobic — or toxic — after prolonged exposure.”

— Fred Camper, “First Friday Film,” Chicago Reader (26th December 1997)

“A tour de force of incongruous juxtapositions, startling dislocations and ingenious visual rhymes assembled from the banal detritus of late night TV.”

— New York Video Festival (1998)

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1 and American Psycho(drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford.

Animal Charm is the collaborative project of Rich Bott and Jim Fetterley, sound and media artists. Assuming a deconstructive take on propriety, Animal Charm began creating videos as an act of Electronic Civil Disobedience. Diving the dumpsters of video production companies and scrounging through countless hours of industrial, documentary, and corporate video footage, Animal Charm often edits the tapes in live mix performances. By re-editing images derived from a wide variety of sources, they scramble media codes, creating a kind of convulsive babble that disrupts conventional forms with subversive messages.

Animal Charm are inspired by a virtual community on the web that is concerned with recycled media, congenial to projects such as John Oswald's Plunderphonics, Stock Hausen and Walkman, Dummy Run, and heavy warped records.

"Animal Charm's tapes are mind-bendingly inventive experiments in uncanny, surreal montage that defy logical analysis."

— Gavin Smith, New York Video Festival

"The two exemplary shows of 2000 that rocked my world and justified my love — make that masochism of the margin: in September, Animal Charm's wild-ass, wigged-out, red-hot live video remix of bad 80s TV; in November, the deliriously delicious (improvised?) duet between accordionist Mark Growden and the eye-popping emulsion experiments of Thad Povey's (found) Scratch Films. New wine in old bottles!"

— Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Best of 2000 issue