Page 18 - through Clusters and Networks

Interwoven

lace works

Interwoven lace work was the first thought I had when I saw the colony
patterns in a 5 mm drop of yeast in a Petri dish, under the microscope. The
sight of patterns in that drop triggered a chain reaction of experimenting the
design possibilities through the process of yeast culturing. Yeast is usually
set in a media constituting agar, yeast extracts and peptone (proteins). The
media is then allowed to settle and dry before spotting with the culture.

These spot-tings are kept under a certain temperature over a few days, and
form themselves into something called “rugose” colonies. With slight
variants in the media mixture as a catalyst, it became possible to explore a
lot more of these colony patterns. After some trial and error, multiple
culturing, observations, imaging and a bit of luck, we managed to fish out a
few colony designs. What we had in hand finally were somewhat an
angelic island, a ruckus web, a tapestry, doilies, meshed wirework,
archaeological ruins of some site, to mention a few similes. Every pattern is
perfect to each micrometer measure in scale of its spread with no detail
diluted.

Project Wood Wide Web began with observing and trying to understand
the form and structure of mycelia nets (which forms the body of a fungus as
hyphae spreading across the roots of trees). Yeast, on similar lines, is also a
fungi (unicellular). A first hand experience with yeast, one of the closest kin
to mycelia was a brilliant insight into its self-organization.

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