VizChitra 2025

What if your calorie tracker could tell you a story—not just about how many carbs you ate, but about how you felt when you logged them? Caloripoorna is a data storytelling exploration that weaves together food, mood, and mythology. Using real calorie-tracking app data layered with mood logs and journal entries, this project transforms mundane numbers into a reflective journey—visualized through interactive mandalas, rotating macros, and ambient sonification.

In this session, I’ll walk you through how this experimental project was built using web-based tools like p5.js, and how AI, motion, and sound were layered to represent states of nourishment, guilt, joy, and deprivation. Drawing inspiration from Hindu mythological archetypes of food, health, and femininity—particularly the character of Calipoorna (inspired by Annapoorna), a modern-day avatar of abundance and discipline—the project becomes a mirror for how data visualizations can hold nuance and contradiction. This isn’t about data accuracy. It’s about data intimacy.

Takeaways:
A framework for turning quantified self-data into emotional, cultural, and mythological storytelling.

Hands-on ideas for using open web tools (like p5.js) to create immersive, interactive visualizations of personal health data.

Audience:
This session is for data artists, health tech researchers, quantified-self nerds, and anyone curious about new forms of narrative data experiences, especially at the intersection of culture, identity, and embodiment.

Bio:
I am an interdisciplinary educator, artist, and engineer working at the intersection of data, story, and embodied experience. I make semiconductor chips at Texas Instruments, and have built interactive installations like Plastic Prayaschitta and Palmistry of Possibilities for festivals such as FutureFantastic and Dimensions. My work spans AI art, poetry, urban memory, and performance—with a focus on feminism, belonging, and speculative futures.