Soda Jerk

Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS, a blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horror of our contemporary moment. Equal parts political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a rogue remapping of national mythology, where a misogynistic remark is met with the sharp beak of a bird, feminist bike gangs rampage and bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep. By intricately remixing fragments of Australia's pop culture and film legacy, TERROR NULLIUS interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country's vexed sense of self.

Comprised entirely of hundreds of pirated film samples, Hello Dankness is a bent suburban musical that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in the American suburbs, the film follows a neighbourhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other political contagions. Part political satire, zombie stoner film, and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture.

In this trans-temporal science fiction, a young River Phoenix from the film The Explorers (1985) opens a wormhole to contact his older self in My Own Private Idaho (1991). Haunted by the spectre of Phoenix's death in 1993, The Phoenix Portal summons the paranormal power of recorded media to collapse time and reanimate the dead.

Splicing together footage from the musical comedy Pardon My Sarong (1942) and the TV series Graffiti Rock (1986), Tap Hop stages a dance battle between the pioneering 1980's hip-hop crew the New York City Breakers and the seminal 1940's tap group Tip Tap & Toe.

A collaboration between Soda_Jerk and The Avalanches.

Through a re-imagining of the initial sequence of the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), the fantasy world of cinema and the reality of Judy Garland’s complex life collide. Instead of taking Dorothy to Oz, the twister transports a young, hopeful Garland into the future where she encounters her disillusioned adult self.

An episode in Soda_Jerk's multi-channel digital-video installation cycle entitled "Astro Black". This episode considers the politics implicit in Public Enemy’s claim that we’re already living [in] armaged-don. It begins with the discovery of an ancient stone crosshairs at an archeological site in Egypt. Sixty years later a giant alien mothership emerges from a mena-cing cloud over New York City, hijacking President Ron-ald Reagan’s TV statement in order to transmit a pirate broadcast from Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Sun Ra. Like Sun Ra’s mantra that ‘it’s after the end of the world’, Public Enemy invoke armageddon to insist upon the critical moment in which we already live.

An episode in Soda_Jerk's multi-channel digital-video installation cycle entitled "Astro Black". We are the Robots re-imagines the iconic scene in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), where sci-entists use a synthesizer keyboard to communicate with an alien mothership. In Soda_Jerk’s revision of these events, Kraftwerk play sequences from their own music and the mothership responds with frag-ments of tracks that have sampled Kraftwerk. This jam session– between the original and sampled ver-sions of Kraftwerk’s music–explores the impact of German electronic music on Afrofuturist sonic culture.