Portrait of Popo Loko / Megisba Malaya [tran§forma-Xi]
HD Colour, 4 minutes 44 seconds (Perpetual Loop)
A macro descent into flesh, metal, and mercury as Popo Loko metamorphoses into the megisba malaya. Rendered through compound-eye optics, the film asks whether technology can still carry cosmology within it — or whether transformation now means dissolving into a single, undifferentiated surface.
Part of XO (2026), the work is an extension of Fyerool Darma's ongoing work kædæluwær§æk§§æk (A Xenographer's Index), first commissioned and presented at the Malay Heritage Centre, Singapore (2026). The work is an imagining of an expedition into n**antara, a parallel world of the Nusantara, the installation unfolds as a cinematic and virtual double of Padimai's physical exhibition space. Here, a worker responds to an AI's job listing, "Memory Diver," and enters a process of extraction. Narrated by a butterfly that remains in a room that no longer exists, the work asks what survives a system built to turn everything it encounters into data.