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Blood Sugar

Audio archive of conversations recorded with current and former injection drug users.

Year 2010
Format
Website
Credits by Sharon Daniel
Design and Programming by Erik Loyer
Recognition
Curator’s Prize for Design, Map Open Space Competition, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Go to project

An interactive interface to an online audio archive of conversations recorded with current and former injection drug users. This work of public art brings their voices into dialogue with other legal, political, and social theorists as well as medical researchers and social scientists that study addiction disorders. Blood Sugar enhances awareness of the relation between poverty, addiction, and HIV transmission, and the social and political implications of the “war on drugs.”

Video Traversal

A high quality recording of the project as a user might experience it.


Each participant’s conversation appears in the work as an audio “body,” a kind of upright waveform that measures the density of topics addressed as opposed to the volume of the sound itself.
As users explore a given conversation, they are drawn closer and closer to a “nucleus” which exposes keywords that enable navigation through topics common to multiple participants.
The exterior of the nucleus is the domain of the social; within the nucleus we find the biological, and those thematic connections that exist between Daniel’s interviewees.