The Slop Cycle

The "Slop Cycle" was created during a Choreographic Coding Lab held at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London in June 2026. Its first entry appeared as part of the presentation "Body/Slop: Being a Body in the Age of Computation". It appeared as an agent of disembodied connectionism, contrasted with a body as fundamentally relational. and was meant to illustrate an idea of "Slop" as an epistemic void or pure form without content and connection without relation. During the lab, the exploration continued through two more entries.

The term itself originates from pig food, a mixture of food thrown together not as a form of nurturing and care, but as a means of fattening up the animal, making it ready for slaughter. In the context of AI and internet culture, it represents a simulacrum of creativity, and low-quality content devoid of a meaningful social, artistic process.

The cycle posits AI Slop as devoid of relation, which is defined here as essentially active and processual, it still does not contest its role in the contemporary production of art. Rather, it explores AI (Slop) as a point of departure and a demarcation of the fringes of human expression as social reproduction.

The tools and tokens consumed in the creation of the works were sponsored by the company ElevenLabs in order to explore their product in the context of the Choreographic Coding Lab.

Slopvertisement

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An advertisement for insurance against online identity theft, which is presented by two internet memes.

The entirety of the clip was generated in a fully automated environment called Flows. It presents the user with the ability to prompt an outline for a project, then goes on to generate suggestions for scenes, key visuals, soundtrack and narrative. The user is prompted to provide more information, and the system eventually assembles the full clip.

Originally, the clip was supposed to feature two prominent internet characters related to the discussion around "Slop". Shrimp Jesus, a Christ-like figure made of many shrimps that became prominent in the context of Facebook engagement spam and almost synonymous with the term Slop. The second one, Tralalero Tralala, is part of the pantheon of Italian Brainrot, which was, although this is disputed, ikely initiated by the artist Fabian Mosele, but eventually dissolved in a wave of internet memes beyond its author's control.

However, the content filters of the initial text-to-video model Veo, made by Google, rejected the inclusion of religious symbols such as Jesus Christ. The ElevenLabs agent then suggested getting around this restriction by only describing the character without mentioning the name. This eventually worked in the video model created by the company Kling AI, but caused Tralalero to become an opera singer instead — which was fitting, as the lab was held at the Royal Opera.

Slopumentary

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A documentary about the origins of internet Slop, in which a rugged filmmaker travels to Palo Alto to investigate the discovery of a cave below a data centre.

This entry was again made in the fully automated tool environment. Here, however, the feature of automatic composition was not able to compose a consistent video, most likely due to the extended length and the more complex narrative. The edit was eventually completed in the editing tool Final Cut. Still, all scenes, as well as the narration and dialogue, were entirely generated by the AI models. The narration then served as the basis in the editing software, the missing scenes were added during editing on demand, and transferred into the cut.

In the cycle, this entry represents a more hybrid and ambivalent variation of the approach toward Slop. It cannot be denied that there intention and a creative process are involved, going beyond a mere sequence of prompts. It was also the most time- (and token-) consuming process, taking about eight hours from idea to completion. It gestures towards the possibility of an artistic, expressive approach to generative AI, while still questioning its potential to transcend its generic and almost absurd "aesthetic of the average", merely regurgitating shallow references, tropes and clichés.

Slopaganda

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Presenting the case for AI music as the saviour of an otherwise doomed music scene.

This entry comments on the darkest side of AI-generated internet Slop: the political advertisement. Ready to be recreated in endless variations through mostly automated workflows, essentially tailoring it to specific groups sharing ideas, fears and assumptions, combined with highly targeted advertising, it allows to nudge or reinforce public opinion in an unprecedented way.

It takes a ridiculous argument, that music has been devoid of originality for decades and that only AI can save it from the nefarious grip of the industry, and illustrates it in a clip, for which the workflow took a mere two hours to set up. This base workflow could then be replicated in similar ways, requiring even less time to make.

Conclusion

The Slop Cycle does not contest the possibility of artistic intention or value in AI-generated artworks. Furthermore, it does not seek to comment on the morality of using AI-based tools to generate media. The material, psychological, and epistmic effects have been commented on ad nauseam, including by me, and there is widespread disdain for AI-generated content in the public sphere. Why use it then? To be perfectly honest: The broad availability of AI tools and my own close vicinity to available open weight models, infrastructure and subventioned usage of paid services eventually prompted me to produce one of these dreaded "AI and I" articles that appear in magazines papers, and blogs. In this vein, it is an autoethnographic experiment that allowed me to confirm, from a very privileged point of view, what I already knew. That environments mediated by corporate interests are always structurally limiting to artistic expression, that "Keep it simple, stupid" is the most boring approach to art making, that craft is always hard (and that that's a good thing), and that funneling everything through written language is a piss-poor version of what it means to be cognitive.