Animal Charm Collective
Animal Charm
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format video
Year 1996
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Collectif Animal Charm
Running time 86 min
Films
ANIMAL CHARM: GOLDEN DIGEST (1996) 86'
Description
Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By recomposing television excerpts to the point of reducing them to a kind of visual and sonic stutter, they force television to lose its meaning. While this disruption remains playful, it also reveals an 'essence' of mass culture that could not otherwise be discerned. Pieces like Stuffing, Ashley or Lightfoot Fever disrupt the hypnotism of television spectacle, revealing how advertising generates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature," and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images.
By pushing television to convulse, perhaps we can finally hear what it's really saying.
"Animal Charm uses image and sound to provoke a particular kind of laughter: the unsettling kind that seizes you like a seizure."
— Johnny Ray Huston, San Francisco Bay Guardian