Distant Early Warning weaves together the multiple timescales of climate crisis, colonization, and resource extraction as experienced by the Inupiat village of Kivalina, Alaska—a community forcibly settled on a narrow barrier reef island above the Arctic Circle in the early twentieth century. 

In the last two decades, the retreat of Arctic ice has rendered Kivalina vulnerable to coastal erosion and increasingly powerful storms. Despite sustained community organizing, including several unsuccessful lawsuits against the 26 largest fossil fuel companies globally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the largest zinc mine in the US, Kivalina’s spit of sand is becoming an increasingly difficult place to live. For example, when Typhoon Merbok hit Kivalina in 2022, the community had to work together to stop homes from falling into the sea. Named for a series of Cold War era radar stations operated by the US and other countries in the Arctic to watch for Soviet attacks, Distant Early Warning assembles oral testimonies, archival images, and multiple timelines, alongside digital scans of permafrost samples and hyperspectral imaging of ice cores from the McCall Glacier in Alaska, to warn about the dire realities of the climate collapse underway and the failures of courts and current environmental policies.

The timeline on the right-hand wall begins in 1700, one of the earliest dates that scientists have found greenhouse gases in ice core samples. It details the history of oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea alongside the consequences of global warming for the community of Kivalina. The left-hand timeline follows the development of the Red Dog Mine, the largest zinc mine in the US, located 60 miles east of Kivalina. The installation tracks the mine’s annual profits, annual release of toxic waste, and frequent violations of EPA regulations–demonstrating that the fines levied by the EPA are minimal in comparison to the profits. Situated between these timelines, a lightbox table highlights the intertwining processes of US colonialism, militarism, and capitalism, including the incursion of industrial whaling in the mid-19th century and the growth of oil extraction in the 20th century. Several images and testimonies criticize the 1971 Alaska Native Land Claims Act, which transformed Indigenous lands into private territories and communities into corporate shareholders.

“We called these places our lands. We called it ours because we hunted on it, we gathered the food from it, and we never ever sought to dominate it…When ANCSA passed, by force we became landowners with titles and deeds to plots of land…It's an assimilation document.” - Enoch Adams, member of the Native Village of Kivalina

Kivalina historically relied upon bowhead whales for sustenance, and the whale hunt, which involves camping on the ice in the springtime, is a significant cultural event. Warming Arctic temperatures have thinned and reduced the sea ice cover, making it significantly more dangerous and harder to reach the whales as they move further away from the coast in response to the changing ice and noise pollution. The last successful whale harvest was in 1994.

“By the time my son is ready to take over, there might be no more ice, there might be no more bowheads, because our ocean is changing.” - Reppi Swan, member of the Native Village of Kivalina

“Unfortunately, the Western Culture dominates, but we survived. No matter what the law says, we still exist. They can’t write us away. They can’t regulate us away. We are still here.” - Colleen Swan member of the Native Village of Kivalina

Special thanks to: Colleen Swan and Enoch Adams of the Native Village of Kivalina, The

Native Village of Kivalina Tribal government, the City Council of Kivalina, Michael Gerace, Jen Marlow, and P. Joshua Griffin.

Distant Early Warning was made possible through collaboration with Re-Locate Kivalina.

Under the direction of Michael Gerace, Re-Locate Kivalina convened artists from around the world to work with the Iñupiaq community of Kivalina, Alaska. ReLocate built artistic and web-based platforms intended to make the social, political, and environmental issues related to relocation visible to global audiences; support community discussion and consensus building; locate, connect and educate new relocation partners; create spaces where people in Kivalina could share original media and ideas about local identities and ways of life; and develop an infrastructure for managing global support and pursuing relocation planning opportunities.

Photographs and video clips included in this work were contributed by Re-locate Kivalina partners and collaborators: Nisan Almog, Sharon Daniel, Claudia Eipeldauer, Michael Gerace, P. Joshua Griffin, Jen Marlow, Klaus Mayer, and Hannah Oellinger, and Kivalina community members Janet Mitchell, Mida Swan, and Colleen Swan.

Radio transmissions include excerpts from interviews with Colleen Swan and Enoch Adams.

Sea mammal sounds were recorded by Chloe Lew.

Permafrost Core Sample images were collected using a Geotek Multi-Sensor Core Logger in the Permafrost Archives Science (PACS) Laboratory at the University of Alberta. Special thanks to Director Dr. Duane Froese and Joel Pumple.

Images of ice cores taken from Alaska’s McCall Glacier were acquired using the IceSpec hyperspectral imaging system, operated at the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility in Denver, Colorado, NSF Grant No.  2149519. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2041950.  Special thanks to Professor Andrei Kurbatov, University of Maine.

Archival images were found in the Col. Frank C. and Clara G. Churchill Collection, National Museum of the American Indian. AC.058, Alaska [P23379, P23368, P23369, P23364], Box 18-21, 1905, 1906, 1909-1910, and the Alaska Digitization Project of the National Archives at Seattle. 

Description co-authored with Alex Moore

Images from the exhibition “Weather and the Whale” at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz

REASONABLE DOUBT(S)

a multi-part, multi-media examination of the role of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the wrongful convictions of Black men who have been wrongfully imprisoned because of who they are and where they were from – because they live within a history of racism and economic struggle in which place, race, poverty, and gender predetermine their encounters with police and courts. The project focuses on the relation between race, place, identity, and systemic injustice in the US criminal legal system.

Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One “Central Valley” is an immersive, three-channel video installation documenting the history of official misconduct that led to the wrongful conviction of Timothy James Young, an innocent, Black, death row prisoner currently incarcerated in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. Young’s death penalty conviction in predominantly white Tulare County, California, depended on police misconduct (including suborning the false testimony of a jailhouse informant, witness intimidation, and evidence tampering), prosecutorial misconduct (withholding exculpatory evidence and racially biased jury selection), judicial abuse of discretion, and false or misleading interpretation of forensic evidence. The 40,000-page case file and over 12,000-page transcript of Young’s trial provide a startling account of a ten-year-long investigation and prosecution riddled with racist abuses. Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One “Central Valley” delves deeply into this massive set of documents to investigate the investigation and trial, interlacing archival media based on transcripts, case files, and forensic evidence, newly recorded and performed ‘readings’ of transcripts and reports, and original interviews with legal experts and case participants. Set in the Central Valley of California, Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One also draws a connection between the history of Black migration from the Jim Crow South to the area in the 1930s and 40s, the rise of mass incarceration, and the prison building boom in California’s agricultural communities in the 1980s and 90’s, and the disproportionate rates of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of men from relatively small and marginalized Black communities.

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over 2 million people, in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, provides abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. On July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made primarily by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardship. Unfortunately, their words are all we have access to. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted, and the use of solitary confinement has expanded by orders of magnitude. Prisoners are stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication and ultimately rendered invisible.

EXPOSED is designed to reveal the overwhelming scope and scale of this humanitarian crisis. Its monochrome, image-less interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of ‘headline-style’ quotations taken from statements made by thousands of incarcerated individuals across the country, signals that the injustices they collectively endure are structural.

[Design and Programming by Erik Loyer | Research Assistance from Brian Myers]

Design and programming by ERIK LOYER for the VECTORS JOURNAL, edited by Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson

Blood Sugar

BLOOD SUGAR examines the social and political construction of poverty and addiction in American society through the eyes of those who live it. Because addicts in the US must fear encounters with regimes of enforcement they are afraid to be seen -- but they do want to be heard. Theirs are the most important voices in the discourse on addiction, public health and poverty and in the US. 

BLOOD SUGAR provides a multi-vocal narrative that links the individual testimony of 20 current and former injection drug users recorded at the HIV Education and Prevention Program of Alameda County and in California state prisons to social theory and biological research.

Design and programming by ERIK LOYER

Inside the distance

In boxing 'the distance' refers to the scheduled length of a fight, 9 rounds or 12, for the boxer, as for all of us, the goal is to stay standing.

Inside the Distance, documents victim/offender mediation practices in Belgium and shows how mediation poses a potential cultural alternative to dominant modes, methods and theories of justice and punishment. This work, which includes interviews with Mediators, Criminologists, Victims and Offenders conducted in Leuven and Brussels, focuses on the subject positions of victim, offender and mediator and the notion that those subject positions are fluid. 

The structure of the project – a web documentary and an installation with video and a touch-screen interactive interface – is organized into three parts:

“the Accounts” – presents the narratives of mediation cases as described to me in interviews with Mediators. These narratives are visualized through staged enactments that represent the notion of being and holding accountable.

“the Positions” – addresses the instability of subject positions – as articulated by Victims, offenders and mediators through their own personal reflections

“the Spaces” – takes up the ethical, theoretical, and discursive space of justice and punishment and the public and political space mediated or, perhaps, governed through law and criminialization in statements made by mediators, psychologists and criminologists.

Criminal acts are rents in the fabric of the social order – expressions of something that doesn’t fit. The mediators interviewed for this project described how mediations almost always begin with a focus on the details – victims and offenders wanting to confirm each others’ understanding of what happened – who was hurt and how – followed by attempts to find some way to understand why.  

INSIDE THE DISTANCE stages reenactments of this encounter as described by victims, offenders and mediators. It explores the subject position of each party - and the many ways in which those positions are fluid. Within Inside the Distance the space of mediation – the mediation table – is represented as a boundary object – a place of cooperation without consensus. At some level, at some moment, we are all victims - we are all offenders.

INSIDE THE DISTANCE is a co-production by LINC-KU Leuven, STUK Arts Centre, Courtisane, University of California Santa Cruz, European Forum for Restorative Justice, Suggonomè – Flemish Mediation Service, and funded by OPAK.

Undoing Time | OBJECTS

In Undoing Time the statements of men and women in prisons across California – those whose voices are rarely heard in debates on criminal justice policy, legislation and governance – are inscribed into products that are produced in prison factories. Each inscribed product is part of a multi-media installation module, which can be exhibited independently or in conjunction with other installation modules from Undoing Time. In each module the inscribed product is accompanied by a video or audio portrait of the quoted prisoner reflecting on his or her own experiences through speech and/or gesture. For example, in Undoing Time/RELIQUARY (above) and Undoing Time/HAUNTINGS (right) the boots and mirrors made and used by prisoners throughout California are labeled with QR codes that link viewers to the full audio of the interview from which the quote etched into the object is taken.

Scroll down for documentation of two video portrait installation modules, Undoing Time/PLEDGE and Undoing Time/ S.O.S.

Undoing Time | Pledge

In the installation Undoing Time/PLEDGE a video portrait co-authored with former prisoner Beverly Henry (who worked in a California prison flag factory while incarcerated) is installed with two American flags produced in the flag factory where she worked during the years she was incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility. The text of an op-ed piece Beverly wrote on the 254th anniversary of Betsy Ross’s birth is embroidered into the stripes of the flags. In the video Beverly performs a symbolic act – undoing the stiches of one of the flags made in the prison factory - while she describes her own search for equality and democracy as a socio-economically marginalized person. In the op-ed text, and through her recorded statements, Beverly’s reflections on the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that the U.S flag purportedly represents, challenge us to examine the structural inequalities at the root of the extraordinary expansion of penal confinement in the United States. 

Scroll down for documentation of Undoing Time | S.O.S.

Undoing Time | S.O.S.

In Undoing Time/S.O.S. targets produced in a prison print shop for police shooting practice are paired with a video portrait/interview of “Franky” - a 21-year-old man who, as a member of California’s notorious Norteño gang (both in and out of prison) has been trapped in a cycle of violence and punishment since he was 12 years old.  The targets are perforated with laser-cut text - quotes that describe Franky’s experience as both a gang soldier and target of state and gang violence inside the maximum security facilities he has inhabited.

scroll down for documentation of Undoing Time | Amends

UNDOING TIME | AMENDS

Undoing Time | Amends  is comprised of four parts. Each of the four 8’ x 12’ flags addresses a particular way in which the constitutional rights of prisoners and poor people of color are violated by the criminal justice system. Embroidery in the stripes and star-fields of each of the four flags juxtaposes quotes taken from constitutional amendments and related Supreme Court decisions with the testimony of individuals whose rights have been violated. 

UNDOING TIME | AMENDS | EXCESSIVE FORCE

A quotation from the fourth amendment to the constitution, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and a statement by Justice William O. Douglas from his dissent in the case of Terry v. Ohio (1968) in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the practice of “Stop and Frisk,” are embroidered into the stripes of the Flag.

Each of the fifty stars in the star-field of the flag bears the name, age, location and date of death of an unarmed black man or woman killed by police.

In front of the flag hang three black hoodies with holes that match the pattern of bullet wounds in the autopsy reports for Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Laquan McDonald. The wall text for the three hoodies references the influence of David Hammons’ In the Hood (1993).

In the center of the four Amends flags there are three stacks of targets, originally produced in a prison print shop, that have been shot to match the pattern of bullet wounds in the autopsy reports for Michael Brown, Malissa Wiliams and Ezel Ford.

Amends | excessive force (8' x 12’ United States flag produced at Central California Women’s facility with custom embroidery by the artist, three stacks of paper targets printed in a California Department of Corrections print shop and altered by the artist, three black ‘hoodies’ altered by the artist).

scroll down for documentation of Amends | Civil Death

UNDOING TIME | AMENDS | CIVIL DEATH

AMENDS | CIVIL DEATH  addresses felon disenfranchisement. Quotes from an interview with former felon and founder of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Desmond Meade, and portions of the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution regarding the right to vote, are embroidered into the stripes of the flag. Each red cap is embroidered with a statistic about the impact of felon disenfranchisement on communities of color and the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Amends | civil death (8' x 12’ United States flag produced at Central California Women’s facility with custom embroidery by the artist. The embroidered text includes quotes taken from an interview with Desmond Meade conducted by Jake Heller for NBC (used here with the permission of Mr. Meade and Mr. Heller). Eight red baseball caps with custom embroidery)

scroll down for documentation of Amends | Social Death

AMENDS | SOCIAL DEATH

The eight amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is embroidered into the stripes of the "social death" flag. The flag faces an interface to an archive of depositions and interviews describing the experience of solitary confinement and documentation from the class action suit Ashker v. Brown. This work is in progress and will eventually include white jumpsuits (the uniform for men in solitary confinement) embroidered with the testimony of the representatives of the class in the Ashker suit.

Amends | social death - (8' x 12’ United States flag produced at Central California Women’s facility with custom embroidery by the artist)

scroll down for documentation of Amends | Gladiator Days

AMENDS | GLADIATOR DAYS

Part of an interview with San Quentin prisoner, Keith Stark, is embroidered into the stripes of the flag. In his interview Keith describes the potential for violence on the “yard” in level four (supermax) prisons. This violence is often prompted by guards as a kind of sport on which to wager. The star-field is embroidered with a quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the relation between as society’s level of civilization and its treatment of prisoners.

Amends | gladiator days - (8' x 12’ United States flag produced at Central California Women’s facility with custom embroidery by the artist)