Design Argument - Blood Sugar
Blood Sugar exposes the social stigmatization and resulting criminalization, of poverty and addiction, through many hours of conversation with injection drug users recorded at a needle exchange program and HIV prevention center in Oakland, California.
I worked with the needle exchange for years but, given the exigencies of the daily lives of addicts, I was able to interview most of the project participants only once. In contrast to the array-like structure of Public Secrets, which allows the women to speak collectively on topics that arose repeatedly in all of our conversations, the interviews in Blood Sugar are kept intact and whole. Given the way in which each interlocutor spontaneously offered their thoughts in the form of personal history and confession, I felt strongly that the interviews should be available in their entirety as continuous narratives -- the way they were offered to me. So designer Erik Loyer and I devised the concept of "audio bodies" - a body-like representation of the audio file for each participant. The space these audio-bodies inhabit and the way they are encountered by the viewer is structured in terms of both the social and biological construction of addiction – at the boundary of the skin.
The interviews are framed by with anecdotal theory through a series of “question texts” and my own audio-body, which is seen and heard in the introduction and conclusion. The fourteen “question texts” respond to a set of somewhat rhetorical questions -- posed from the perspective of the enfranchised political subject -- such as “what do we hold against the drug addict?” The “answers” to these questions carry the principal argument of the piece in the form of a narrative. These texts relate the story of my own transformative education – what I learned about addiction through my encounters with addicts and my research into the neurobiology of addiction. They are intended as a point of suture or identification that should guide the viewer’s education in parallel to mine. It is an education that I feel must be shared, across the socio-economic and political spectrum, to foster effective resistance to the criminalization of illness, poverty and the lack of comprehensive public health care - because, as the piece, we are all living with addiction.
I worked with the needle exchange for years but, given the exigencies of the daily lives of addicts, I was able to interview most of the project participants only once. In contrast to the array-like structure of Public Secrets, which allows the women to speak collectively on topics that arose repeatedly in all of our conversations, the interviews in Blood Sugar are kept intact and whole. Given the way in which each interlocutor spontaneously offered their thoughts in the form of personal history and confession, I felt strongly that the interviews should be available in their entirety as continuous narratives -- the way they were offered to me. So designer Erik Loyer and I devised the concept of "audio bodies" - a body-like representation of the audio file for each participant. The space these audio-bodies inhabit and the way they are encountered by the viewer is structured in terms of both the social and biological construction of addiction – at the boundary of the skin. The interviews are framed by with anecdotal theory through a series of “question texts” and my own audio-body, which is seen and heard in the introduction and conclusion. The fourteen “question texts” respond to a set of somewhat rhetorical questions -- posed from the perspective of the enfranchised political subject -- such as “what do we hold against the drug addict?” The “answers” to these questions carry the principal argument of the piece in the form of a narrative. These texts relate the story of my own transformative education – what I learned about addiction through my encounters with addicts and my research into the neurobiology of addiction. They are intended as a point of suture or identification that should guide the viewer’s education in parallel to mine. It is an education that I feel must be shared, across the socio-economic and political spectrum, to foster effective resistance to the criminalization of illness, poverty and the lack of comprehensive public health care - because, as the piece, we are all living with addiction.| Previous page on path | Designing Argument, page 2 of 2 | Path end, continue |
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