What if the data generated by your everyday online activity could actually feed something alive?
As part of our PyCon Experiences, PyCon Greece 2026 will host Data Compost, an interactive installation by Yiannis Kranidiotis, one of this year’s PyCon Greece speakers and the artist behind the Eat My Algorithm project.
At the heart of the installation is a colony of Pink Oyster mushrooms that grows using energy recovered from digital waste. Yes, actual mushrooms, growing from data.
Data Compost turns invisible digital waste into biological matter.
The system monitors a home network and blocks unwanted digital traffic, including advertising trackers and surveillance scripts. Instead of simply discarding this digital waste, the installation calculates the energy that would have been used to transmit it and turns it into “virtual energy.”
That virtual energy is then used to power the life-support system of the mushrooms, including their ventilation, humidity and lighting.
The result is a fascinating connection between network activity and biological growth: the more digital waste the system can harvest, the more energy becomes available to support the mushrooms.
At the exhibition, you’ll be able to see the process unfold.
Explore the blueprint diagrams behind the system, watch a timelapse of the mushrooms growing alongside the data used to cultivate them, and see the physical bioreactor where the mushrooms grow.
You’ll also be able to see the mushrooms themselves, turning something as intangible as network data into something very physical, biological and alive.
A dedicated web dashboard visualizes the relationship between network ad-blocking activity, virtual energy harvesting and the physical conditions of the bioreactor in real time.
It’s where Python, networks, data, hardware and biology meet, with mushrooms as the living output of the system.
