“. . . probes designed to test the contours of the political, cultural and legal systems.”
“We make films entirely constructed from pirated samples and in this way, consider our practice to be a form of activism and civil disobedience,” Soda Jerk tells me. Formed as an artist duo in Sydney in 2002, the title of this show “points towards” the free-culture politics of Soda Jerk’s practice via a reference to the open source movement – a movement with origins in the early internet history of software development.
Open Sauce presents five works in a show the duo describes as “a succinct survey focused more on ambitious installations of key film works rather than a sprawling playlist.” The duo’s 2016 The Was – a work premised around utopian counter-cultures created over three years in collaboration with electronic music group The Avalanches – is presented on a monumental scale, while political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS – in which Australia features – returns to Adelaide for the first time since it premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2018.

Soda Jerk & The Avalanches, The Was, 2016, video still, 14 minutes. Courtesy the artists and Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia
Also presented here is a two-channel video installation of the duo’s 2012 séance fiction The Time that Remains – a gothic melodrama that stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – as well as a “towering site-specific wall text piece” conceived especially for Open Sauce. But most notable is the premiere of a new feature – Hello Dankness – that was commissioned in partnership with the Adelaide Film Festival and that will screen every day at 3.30pm.
“We received the commission in mid-2018 and planned to premiere the film in October 2020, just prior to the US election in November that year,” Soda Jerk explain. “The film was originally going to cover the four-year period of the Trump presidency from 2016, and we almost had the narrative locked down when in early 2020 things started to unspool into the grand operatic shitshow of a year we all now know.

Soda Jerk, TERROR NULLIUS, 2018, video still, 54 minutes. Courtesy the artists and Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia
“Beyond the very real ye ende tyme feels of the pandemic, at this time, we also became increasingly fascinated by the way that certain vectors of 2016 had begun to mirror those in 2020. Like the Big Daddy Dems’ suppression of Bernie Sanders, the progression of Pizzagate into QAnon conspiracies, the emboldening of white supremacists and the amplification of the culture wars as the true site of electoral politics. So, we basically gutted the film we had and refashioned it into a fable in 6 Acts dealing with the twin election cycles of 2016 and 2020.”
Concerning 2016, Soda Jerk regard it “as the year that the meat world collapsed into the image matrix” and a time when this “feeling that reality had veered psychotropic was palpable everywhere, but nowhere more so than within electoral politics.” While on copyright law, the duo’s “main beef” is described as follows: “it monopolises the ownership and control of representations, narratives and resources of collective culture.”

Soda Jerk, Hello Dankness, 2022, video still, 70 minutes. Courtesy the artists and Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia
It’s an ethos that evokes, in my mind, ideas championed by media scholars like Henry Jenkins who, writing before the internet was common in our homes (let alone our handhelds), argued that active and creative audience practices – such as fan remixes – are culturally significant (and legitimate) for the ways that these forms wrestle control away from corporations, copyright holders and powers-that-be (the political elite included) to position myth and meaning in line with more ancient and community-driven cultural practices: theorised as “textual poaching” and connected with, for example, traditional folk cultures.

Soda Jerk, The Time that Remains, 2012, video still, 12 minutes. Courtesy the artists and Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia
The transformative and transgressive potential of remix culture combined with a critical eye to “the politics of images” and the intertextual, digital literacies necessary to critique and create media today is close to my heart – it was the subject of my PhD. There is much artistry in a Soda Jerk work, that’s true. Such artistry that is on show here and advantageous to the duo’s appeal. But deeper than the technique and proficiency with pirated samples shown in this succinct-yet-monumental survey are, in my estimation, more meaningful, grassroot and raiding commentaries on our culture and the politics of and fight for ownership over representation.
Such commentaries – inclusive of a resistance to orders and relations of highly public, recognised and politically-charged imagery – that have never been more historically vital and that Soda Jerk, at least in principle, seem to share some common ground with me on: “We understand each of our works as probes designed to test the contours of the political, cultural and legal systems in which they circulate, making visible certain frictions and impasses.”
Dr Joseph Brennan is an art critic, author and cultural scholar based in Far North Queensland.
Samstag Museum of Art
18 October to 16 December 2022
South Australia