Blood Sugar

"Blood Sugar" is a work that "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." – Steve Anderson, Vectors Editor