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. It started with the first entry meant to illustrate an idea of "Slop" as 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 the simulacrum of creativity, devoid of a social, artistic process.

While this posits AI slop as devoid of relation, defined here as essentially active and processual, it still does not contest its role in the contemporary production of art. Rather, it explores AI art as a point of departure and a demarcation of the fringes of relational human expression. Ultimately, it contrasts slop as an agent of disembodied connectionism with the body as fundamentally relational.

The tools and tokens consumed in the creation of the works were generously supplied 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.

Here, the entirety of the clip was generated in a fully automated environment called Flows. It presents the user with the ability to prompt a framing 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, very likely 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 &emdash; 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, made by Apple. Still, all scenes, as well as the narration and dialogue, were entirely generated by the AI models. This was laid out in the editing software, and the missing scenes were then created during editing on demand and transferred into the cut.

In the cycle, this entry represents the most hybrid and thus also ambivalent version of the approach toward slop. It cannot be denied that there was both an artistic intention and a creative process that goes beyond a mere sequence of prompts. It was also the most time- (and token-) consuming process, taking about eight hours from first concept 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", only regurgitating 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. Able to be created in endless variations through automated workflows, essentially tailoring it to specific groups sharing ideas, fears and assumptions, combined with highly targeted advertising, it allows to shift 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 can now be replicated in similar ways, requiring even less time to make.