Mellitus

MELLITUS

Mellitus, initiated in 2007, laid the foundation for my Islet series by converting CGM radio transmissions into parametric sculptures. During a conference planning period, I recorded three dietary-stress phases—High Stress/Poor Diet, Moderate Stress/Moderate Diet, and Low Stress/Moderate Diet—over a standard three-month A1C cycle. A 433 MHz RF receiver captured unencrypted CGM packets every five minutes, which a Python script decoded to extract glucose values. These readings populated a fixed-size circular file on disk, maintaining a rolling data window. A Processing sketch normalized each reading against the three-month average, mapping values to parameters radius, extrusion depth, and vertex count in two- and three-dimensional forms. Lower readings pulled shapes inward; spikes pushed surfaces outward, creating breathing, island-like geometries. Initially rendered as a single, rapid-prototyped wax object, the system evolved to generate a series of pendant-sized sculptures—each “islet” a visceral chronicle of glucose fluctuations, stress, and diet rhythms. Together, they materialize the unseen contours of metabolic experience.