SODA JERK
OpenField Film at the Berry School of Arts
Soda Jerk is an artist duo who make sample-based experimental films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images; how they circulate, whom they benefit and how they can be undone. Formed in Sydney in 2002, they’ve been in based in New York since 2012. They have exhibited extensively within the fields of art and experimental cinema, and have collaborated on projects with the cyberfeminist art collective VNS Matrix and electronic music group The Avalanches. Soda Jerk’s new feature Hello Dankness (2022) is a suburban stoner musical that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021.
For OpenField’s closing event, OpenField Film Soda Jerk will screen their political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS (2018). Constructed entirely of hundreds of pirated samples, the feature remix offers an incendiary un-writing of Australian national mythologies. Just days prior to the film’s premire in 2018, it was notoriously disowned by its commissioning body who described the work as “a very controversial piece of art” “UnAustralian”. The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian movies of the decade.