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."
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. ___ Sharon Daniel
