Datascapes-Mold — meghna mitra

“Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.”

-Paul Stamets

This week, we looked fungi, specifically mold. Mold. What an odd and interesting species. Though it is of the earth, it feels almost alien; so unlike my own perception of nature. To me, nature is growth, nature is life but mold is the anti-thesis of that idea. It’s the decay of life but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a part of the cycle.

Mold is essential the break down of living matter. It’s a natural recycling process. Nature is incredibly intelligent that way. A process perfected through billions of years of evolution.

Mold is a type of fungus consisting of many different organisms. There are thousands of known species of mold with diverse lifestyles. Mold is decay but decay isn’t inherently bad; it’s just nature. It’s part of process of life. Decay is simply a process in which organic substances are broken down into simpler organic substances. This decay spoils our bread but is also used in penicillin. I decided to use my music playlist as a data set for this investigation as I needed data with a lot of variables. Since music has many genres, the data is varied which works well with mold.

//Reflection

Overall, I feel what I created here is lacking the complexity of the interactions between “organisms/artists” in my visualization. Each circle remains in its own bubble while the mold is more interactive to its surroundings. Mold also has several textures which add to its complexity while the gradient circles are rather monotone. I think I would like to revisit this investigation at a later date.

I feel that I could explore the idea of the fungi more in depth in my data visualization. Fungi is more intricate and complicated than what I visualized here. Fungi appear in some many different ecosystems not just in forests and soil; some fungi even thrive in human bodies; some helpful, some harmful. How do I convey the complexity of fungi in data visualization?