Ahead of next week’s presidential election, we conclude our series with a madcap recap of the Trump presidency.

Artist duo Soda Jerk make experimental documentaries concerned with the politics of images. Premiering at the Berlinale in 2022, Hello Dankness is a sharp-witted look at U.S. politics in the epoch of the Internet, when “conspiracy becomes contagious” and “reality goes R.I.P.”

Hello Dankness consists of hundreds of film and media sources, re-edited and rotoscoped to create a new cinematic narrative. Soda Jerk considers the film a “psychic ledger” of the political landscape circa 2016, when they first noticed a “historical vibe shift” was moving the world into a new “memetic regime.” 

“Hello Dankness emerged as a response to the profound and profane weirdness of U.S. politics around 2016. Prime-time news channels were reporting on presidential pee-pee tapes, Democrats eating babies, and pedophiles communicating in coded pizza messages. American politics has always had a flair for spectacle, but what felt different was the pervading sense of dankness.” SODA JERK

 

The fictional universe of Hello Dankness centers on a young Tom Hanks (The Burbs), living alongside neighbors Annette Bening (American Beauty), Ice Cube (Friday), Wayne and Garth (Waynes World), and Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network). By interweaving samples from different cinematic eras, Soda Jerk makes visible the matrix of connections between the socio-political conditions of particular administrations and the media being produced under them. After all, only a combination of the Trump presidency and the commodification of identity politics could produce such a cursed video as PepsiCo’s Live For Now.

Soda Jerk is an Australian artist duo based in New York since 2012. They trace their aesthetic and political roots to the breakcore, TorrentFreak, and squatter scenes they were part of in the early 2000s in Sydney. They have collaborated with the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix and electronic music group The Avalanches. Their 2018 political revenge fable Terror Nullius was notoriously disowned by its commissioning body (the Melbourne-based Ian Potter Foundation) who described the film as “UnAustralian.”

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to series co-programmer Courtney Muller.