The Phoenix Portal

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.

A collaboration between Soda_Jerk and The Avalanches.

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.

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.

An episode in Soda_Jerk's multi-channel digital-video installation cycle entitled "Astro Black". Race for Space gives life to Sun Ra’s claim to have been abducted by aliens who schooled him in the radical potential of music. While working as a piano man in Chicago in 1943, Sun Ra is contacted by Morpheus who offers him a choice of two destinies. Flashing forward to the 1969 moon landing, Neil Armstrong discovers that outer space has already been colonized by Sun Ra and his intergalactic ensemble, The Arkestra. At stake in this episode is the cultural politics implicit in the territorialization of outer space, both as a geography and a virtual field of possibility.

In this gothic melodrama, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis perpetually wake to find themselves haunted by their own apparitions and terrorized by markers of time. Isolated in their own screen space, each woman struggles to reclaim time from the gendered discourses of aging that conflates older women with a sense of expiration and invisibility.

An episode in Soda_Jerk's multi-channel digital-video installation cycle entitled "Astro Black". Destination Planet Rock maps the intergalactic legacy of Sun Ra and George Clinton in the sci-fi futurism of early hip-hop. Set in 1974 in the South Bronx, the episode be-gins in a neighborhood center where Sun Ra is explain-ing his ideas about the intersection of race, myth and outer space. The three future originators of hip-hop—DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash—are abducted and transported across the galaxy to Planet Rock, where they are schooled in the alien language of turntablism.

The Year is 3001 and the ancient art of remix is being oppressed by the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Meanwhile, in a secret base-camp on the moon a team of Pixel Pirates plot to overthrow Moses via their latest scientific discovery - video cloning. Their plan: travel back to 1955, abduct Elvis and bring him back to the future. They then clone Elvis and send the Video Clone back to 2015 to assassinate Moses, altering the course of VHS history. But first the Elvis Clone must face-off against the Copyright Cops and every action hero that MGM can throw his way.