Artist Peggy Ahwesh’s City Thermogram, a portrait of the urban everyday through the lens of a heat-sensitive camera, warmed Times Square’s signage from 11:57 pm to midnight each night in April, 2015. Using innovative technology, the piece recast our ‘photographic’ world into one of unexpected revelations about our bodies, energy sources and personal devices. While this technology is usually used for scientific purposes, in Ahwesh’s hands the camera revealed the dynamism of the human body and offered a heat-based visualization of the electrical power grid that we all operate within.

This Midnight Moment was in partnership with Moving Image, a video, film and new media art fair that took place March 5-8, 2015 at the Waterfront Tunnel event space in Chelsea.

City Thermogram was shot with a thermal camera from Princeton’s MIRTHE Lab, funded by the National Science Foundation.

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