/issues/6/bloodsugar/ 2010-04-04 09:40:03 April 4th, 2010 http://vectors.usc.edu/xml/projects/blood_sugar_v1.xml http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/backgrounds/bloodsugar_vecbg.jpg inc/css/screen_dark.css projects/icons/blood_sugar.jpg 0 0 0 0 0 0 This subject position suggests a subtle parity between the "user" of the interface and the IV drug "user" who is, for many of us, ordinarily held at a distance if not ignored entirely. Public Secrets, Blood Sugar aims to fill a gap in the cultural discourse surrounding disenfranchised individuals and stigmatized communities by simply making their voices available to be heard.]]> The messy details of each life history then unfolded according to the syntax and grammar of the disease-and-recovery discourse learned in the kind of therapeutic setting where we met. Overall, the space these bodies inhabit and the way they are encountered by the viewer is structured in terms of the social and biological construction of addiction at the boundary of the skin. Blood Sugar was a particularly arduous one, and a reminder of both the dangers of technological determinism and the value of face-to-face collaboration.]]> Blood Sugar operates as a companion piece to author Sharon Daniel and designer Erik Loyer's earlier, Webby award-winning Vectors project Public Secrets. Like their earlier work, which featured the voices of women in the California State Prison system, the primary content of Blood Sugar is a voice archive compiled from painstakingly recorded interviews with participants in an HIV prevention and needle exchange program in Oakland, CA. These are voices seldom heard from the "other" side of this country's mendaciously named "war on drugs." The project invites listeners to set aside their prejudices and assumptions in order to directly engage the stories of intravenous drug users - a public whose near total lack of self-representation has led to deep misunderstanding at best, demonization and dehumanization at worst. That said, Daniel's approach is not to "speak for" this population, nor is it to put forward a didactic social agenda. Like Public Secrets, Blood Sugar aims to fill a gap in the cultural discourse surrounding disenfranchised individuals and stigmatized communities by simply making their voices available to be heard.

Loyer's design of the project also expands upon the algorithm-driven structure of Public Secrets, adding a dynamic visual metaphor that invites users to "zoom in" to follow conceptual threads or individual stories. Daniel's work, which frequently engages concepts of borders and limits, is interested in this case in the boundary - namely the skin - that separates the inside of our bodies from the outside. Users are invited to engage the project from the point of view of a surrogate for the needle that literally penetrates the surface of the skin, allowing them to delve more deeply and intimately into a given person's testimony. This subject position suggests a subtle parity between the "user" of the interface and the IV drug "user" who is, for many of us, ordinarily held at a distance if not ignored entirely. At first, the visceral pleasures of the project - keywords that glide in elliptical orbits around a pulsing nucleus - may seem antithetical to the raw struggles for survival and dignity that characterize many of the testimonies. But it is the power of the individual stories that keeps the project from becoming an exercise in voyeurism or fetishized tragedy. In the end, Blood Sugar also asks bigger questions about the role that art can and should play in highly politicized and volatile issues of personal empowerment and social justice, inviting complexity and specificity into the conversation rather than simply telling people what to think, feel or do about it.]]> people just outside.

There was an HIV prevention program down the street that ran an open needle exchange three nights a week. I first heard about it on local radio where the non-profit's director told of a city councilman's attempt to force the exchange out of the neighborhood in an effort towards future gentrification. I believed in the efficacy of needle exchange, (albeit in an intellectual and somewhat detached way). I was intrigued by the paradoxical, outsider-subject of addiction, the borderline between dependence on licit and illicit drugs, the mystery and violence of the needle. I had reason to want to escape the privileged isolation of my own sphere to cross over that concrete wall and into another world. This desire was sincere but also driven by curiosity, even voyeurism, and naivet. Unlike prior artists and intellectuals who have pursued research in the arena of drugs (Freud, Benjamin, Burroughs, and De Quincy), I was interested in the social and biological construction of addiction — not the experience of the drug as such. I would cross over through the point of view of the addicted subject. My desire would be satisfied by listening and observing and the responsibility I thus assumed would be left unresolved in my unsuccessful attempts to help one of my interlocutors.

I volunteered at the exchange. Eventually I started to interview people who came to the tent site to swap needles. Most of them lived on the street, had no official identification (either because they had a criminal record or no fixed address) and therefore had no access to basic civic or social services. Their absence in the data-space of the Public sphere had serious implications for them in the physical world. They were in a sense invisible - a kind of secret public.

I got to know one of the women rather well the woman that I call A____ in Blood Sugar. The needle exchange was the last frayed layer of the social safety net for someone like A____. I learned a lot from her about the third world inside the first. I learned that the realities of poverty, racism, social isolation, trauma, sexual abuse, and sex-based discrimination could make a person, even an extraordinarily intelligent person, vulnerable to addiction and psychosis. I learned a lot from A_____ about desperation and about resilience. I learned that the complex struggle over civil liberties and social rights in electronically mediated information space is materially different from the one on the street. There is another public outside a secret public that is simultaneously visible and invisible, and to most, illegible and incomprehensible. The men and women who spoke with me at the needle exchange, and allowed me to record our conversations, are part of this secret public. They deserve to be heard and understood. The accounts they give are not natural, objective descriptions of an unambiguous reality. No one I met at the exchange described him or herself as a righteous dopefiend. On the contrary, each self-narrative began with a kind of confession or characterization of addiction as a weakness or disease. The messy details of each life history then unfolded according to the syntax and grammar of the disease-and-recovery discourse learned in the kind of therapeutic setting where we met. But the fact that the telling is inflected by its context and social construction does not mean that the lived experience so related is any less real, or powerful, or deserving of attention.

Blood Sugar presents a public record of this secret public. It provides evidence and testimony through an interface to the many hours of conversation I recorded at the needle exchange. In the interface each individual interlocutor is represented as a waveform or "audio body" these audio bodies are linked together through "parasitic" connections revealed in their stories of pain, violence, abuse, and despair. Overall, the space these bodies inhabit and the way they are encountered by the viewer is structured in terms of the social and biological construction of addiction at the boundary of the skin. The recorded interviews are framed by a series of texts that I have written in response to a set of somewhat rhetorical questions posed from the perspective of the Public such as "what do we hold against the drug addict?" The texts incorporate my research into the neuroscience of addiction with my experience while interacting with the clients of the needle exchange.

In this work I have been more of an immigrant than an artist or ethnographer — crossing over from the objective to the subjective, from expertise or authority to unauthorized alien. As an academic I was once reluctant to include my own story in my work. But my position is not neutral; in theory or in practice, that would be an impossible place. So I have crossed over into what theorists such as Jane Gallop and Michael Taussig call "the anecdotal," where theorizing and storytelling, together, constitute an intervention and a refusal to accept reality as it is.

It is my hope that the testimony gathered here, will challenge you, as it has summoned me, to refuse and resist the paradoxes of social exclusion and othering that attend the lives of those who suffer from poverty, alienation, and addiction.]]> Public Secrets, Blood Sugar provided Sharon Daniel and I a unique opportunity to revisit the approaches of the earlier work in light of material quite different in both its form and content. Sharon and I agreed early on that the basic aesthetic direction established in Public Secrets should remain intact. After spending some time with the recordings to be featured in Blood Sugar, however, it quickly became clear that a different approach to navigating the audio would be required. Where the statements of Public Secrets' interviewees could readily be segmented into concise utterances on particular topics, the current and former injection drug users heard in Blood Sugar demanded longer periods of sustained attention, the various stories they tell dissolving into each other in ways which resisted atomization.

This continuous quality resonated with the biological element which plays such an important role in the project. Sharon's focus on the chemical proclivities of the human mind and body lent itself to the introduction of visual metaphors normally associated with medicine: each interview would become a waveform-like "body" annotated with statements, questions, explanations, and even numerical "data" measuring a given interviewee's oscillations between topics located primarily outside of the skin (social) or inside the skin (biological). The amplitude of these visual waveforms are determined not by the volume of the audio for each interview, but instead by the density of Sharon's annotations at any given time. These annotations were input into the project database using a custom tool that allowed for each piece of content to be tied to a specific point of a given interview, and for the timing of whole interview to be associated with its transcript, so users wishing to switch between listening and reading can do so without losing their place.

The design process for Blood Sugar was a particularly arduous one, and a reminder of both the dangers of technological determinism and the value of face-to-face collaboration. Nintendo's Wii console was still experiencing its meteoric rise in popularity at the time we started working on this project, and I immediately set my sights on making the piece one that could be controlled both with mouse and keyboard and with the Wii remote. Sharon agreed this would be an interesting avenue to pursue, and very quickly we hit upon the idea that the remote could serve as a tactile surrogate for each audio "body" in the piece. Tilting the remote into different orientations would likewise rotate the currently active body/waveform, revealing different sets of annotations depending on whether the remote was pointing straight up and down, sideways, or forwards.

We both became so enamored of this idea that for many months it remained an unquestioned assumption in our design process—until fifteen or so rounds of iteration made it clear that as an interface conceit it simply didn't add anything to the experience. Not long after this crisis we hit upon the much simpler visual metaphor of "getting closer," a simple zoom through various stations of depth at which specific questions and content could be staged. Suddenly our visual metaphor was working with the content instead of against it, and everything quickly fell into place. As our work process for Public Secrets involved several all-day face-to-face meetings which proved extraordinarily productive in solving some of that project's thorniest design problems, we wondered how much time could have been saved if we had arranged for a few similar get-togethers during the production of Blood Sugar, as all meetings for that project took place via videoconference or phone.

In the end, however, the logjam was broken, more conventional Wii remote support was added for an installation version of the project, lessons were gratefully learned, and the collaboration was no less rewarding.]]>