Soda Jerk

Algorithmic K-Holes and the Techno-Serfdom of Simulated Entrapment Under Slop Capitalism.

Soda Jerk is an Australian artist duo who create sample-based films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images: how they circulate, who they benefit and how they can be undone.

Their recent feature Hello Dankness premiered at the Berlinale in 2023 and has received numerous awards, including Best Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival and MIFF’s Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award. Hello Dankness followed Soda Jerk’s controversial political revenge fable Terror Nullius, which was disowned by its commissioning body as “UnAustralian.” The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian movies of the decade.

Soda Jerk’s Algorithmic K-Holes and the Techno-Serfdom of Simulated Entrapment Under Slop Capitalism is a hallucinatory video installation that fuses academic critique with the paranoid rhythms of conspiracy rants. The work proposes that k-holes, mini golf holes and the internet are interconnected expressions of a simulated, pre-coded game space—an algorithmically constrained environment where apparent freedom is an illusion, and we’re becoming increasingly dislocated from the real.

Drawing on ’90s paranormal TV, early-2000s golf tutorials, TikTok slop and the cybernetic logic embodied by the Teletubbies, Soda Jerk channels a hyperreal aesthetic that’s both playful and disorienting. Samples are processed through AI tools—video generation, audio cloning, rotoscoping—embracing glitches, psychedelic liquidity and hallucinated “wrongness” over realism.

The video is designed as a seamless loop, where the end folds into the beginning, while hypnotic audio—manipulated through synth hardware and distortion boxes—anchors the experience. This immersive piece critiques the structures of digital capitalism, the gamification of attention and our complicity in systems of control, inviting viewers to navigate the surreal terrain of algorithmic entrapment with a sense of both folly and critical awareness.

Installation view of ‘Algorithmic K-Holes and the Techno-Serfdom of Simulated Entrapment Under Slop Capitalism‘, Soda Jerk (2025). Commissioned by RISING Melbourne. PHOTO: Eugene Hyland.