RASUK, Poisoning My Own SEO

Google’s AI Overviews gather information from across the web and compress it into a convenient answer. For an artist, this can produce something resembling the water-cooler version of an artist statement – a few sentences that flatten a messy artistic process into something legible and seemingly definitive. RASUK, Poisoning My Own SEO interferes with that process by giving Google too many Heheheheherdimases.

RASUK, meaning »to possess« in Indonesian, is an ongoing artistic framework in which Heheheheherdimas inhabits familiar technologies and redirects their operational logic toward unintended purposes. Earlier iterations have used Google Docs, Adobe Acrobat, YouTube playlists, and other everyday software as theatrical spaces, where ordinary interface actions become choreographed into live desktop performances. In this iteration, that logic takes the form of duplication.

Five cloned websites appear under plausible misspellings of Herdimas Anggara: Hermidas, Herrdimas, Herdinas, Angarra, and Anggarra. Each functions as a doppelgänger of Heheheheherdimas’s original site and presents a (slightly) distorted identity through a different Indonesian mask and a variation of the same basic website.

The misspellings come from an ordinary problem: People frequently have difficulty spelling or even pronouncing Herdimas Anggara. By poisoning his own SEO (search engine optimization), Heheheheherdimas turns self-representation into a game of telephone between himself and the AI system that interprets the search results. Hehehehehe stitches the original Heheheheherdimas together with his misspelled quintuplets as hehehehehe hehehehehedges the question of which one is authoritative. Hehehehehe.