This slightly sarcastic work is an interactive simulation of microbiomic activity in response to overloading with particular fermented foods, eaten sequentially over a short term period for the Feel Your Fermented Biome Residency at Coalesce Bio Art Lab in Buffalo in early 2022. For a 6 week period myself and Roland van Dierendonck ate a specific diet including lactorfermted foor first, then aceto-bacterial nutrients, followed by a natto heavy period, one with more fungal fermented products and finally a fermentation overload week to finish. As time was so limited and our hypothesis was effectually disproven in the first few days, the processes often seemed futile to me and as such it seemed a times like each day was (due to the frequent fecal sampling, DNA extraction and general digestive responses to random weird food) literally, same shit different day.

This P5.JS visualisation take the first 2 sets of sequenced data (the only two we in fact had results returned for during the time we were on residency) and implemented a simulation where by the spheres in their ‘perfect’ form, would assume that the original, baseline samples were our individual gut homeostasis benchmarks and then the morphing that can be seen is based on quantified predictive assumptions we (naively) made. These rather violent looking fluctuations could be sated with a simple ‘belly rub’ or in other words a tactile, haptic engagement with the spheres, via a basic interface.