Herdimas Anggarra's Ecstatic Interfaces
Todd Anderson
Herdimas Anggarra's Ecstatic Interfaces
January 20, 2025
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim
Herdimas Anggarra is one of the foremost leaders on design thinking, or so the introduction to Rasuk, his one-hour solo performance at CultureHub would have us believe. He is an expert on "design thinking frameworks" and if there's one thing I'll be taking away from this performance lecture, it's that we have to "co-innovate." At least until it all falls apart.
Our design thinking slides wretch and twist away and I am transported out of my TED-talk audience reverie onto a galloping horse made of desktop icons while the speakers blast an upbeat remix of "My Humps" and audience plants fire cash guns into the air.
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim.
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim
Herdimas is a master choreographer of the desktop and web browser. The man behind the curtain of the haunted computer. His work transforms the mundane interfaces of YouTube, Gmail, Acrobat and Finder into pulsing, writhing animations featuring mythical creatures from Indonesian folklore. A hallmark of Herdimas's performances is the constant subversion of expectations. You think you are looking at a playlist of YouTube videos only to see it rotate and pulse into a musical waveform moving to the driving beat. It creates the atmosphere of a magic show. What is happening? And how? What is real and what is illusion? What parts are painstakingly rehearsed clicking and dragging and what parts are scripts designed to mimic painstakingly rehearsed clicking and dragging? Where is the cursor? Where are his hands?
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim
I first saw Herdimas's work on the open projector of my monthly talk/performance series WordHack. This was during the pandemic when the shows were happening on Zoom. Herdimas signed up for a 5-minute slot and then seemed like he was having all too familiar difficulties with screen sharing ("can you see my screen?" "can you hear sound?".) Except soon, the Zoom interface was being duplicated, triplicated, copied into a hall of mirrors as Herdimas's voice got higher and higher pitched, turning the common annoyance of troubleshooting into a release of subversive delight.
Herdimas's performances are "site-specific" where the site might be a literal website like Youtube or Gmail, or another familiar digital locale like the Mac desktop. Herdimas, like Houdini, creates the box (design thinking) from which the escape is the performance. Assisting him is a bookmarks bar full of buttons with names like GEMPA BAMI KEPARAT which, when clicked, rotate and shake elements on a website creating a visual instrument of transformation.
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim.
A primary inspiration for Herdimas is the concept of ‘ecstasy’, a transcendent state of frenzy that is the goal of much traditional Indonesian dance and performance. Herdimas objects to the way ecstasy is portrayed in the modern age, as in the PDF of Kathy Foley’s academic paper “The Dancer and the Danced: Trance Dance and Theatrical Performance in West Java” which Herdimas visually deconstructs in the latter half of Rasuk. The paper discusses emotional and mystical transcendence in a form that is almost entirely their opposite, the dry copy of an academic text. Herdimas would rather explore the ecstasy of traditional Indonesian ritual through the frenetic choreography of windows and icons, recreating trance dance inside of the screen.
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim
No one out there is making work quite like Herdimas, but for some frames of reference we can look to the tradition of desktop performance such as Jon Satrom’s Prepared Desktop or JODI’s My%Desktop where artists live manipulate the windows on their desktop to surprising results. There’s also software art that choreographs and inserts itself into the viewer’s own desktop such as Mark Fingerhut's 'Goblin' or DESCENT (with Peter Burr).
Photo by Ji Hoon Kim
The throughline here is making the computer strange again. Revealing digital interfaces with their familiar menus, borders, icons and bezels as the arbitrary rectangles they are, and how they could as easily be the teeth of a demon's grin or a plume of dragon's fire. Herdimas's performances encourage us to break free of tech's monotony and lose ourselves in the ecstatic sublime. No interface is safe from this pioneer of design thinking.
Todd Anderson is a NYC-based digital poet and Co-Director of the School for Poetic Computation. He is the host and curator of the monthly WordHack language+technology talk series at Wonderville in Brooklyn.