New York City at it’s core, is known as a center of the arts.  You can get your art fill all over the city, making stops along museum mile, gallery hopping in Chelsea, taking in the street art in Dumbo, or making the trek out to PS1 in Queens, and now even in one of the most iconic spots in all of the city… Times Square.

Now, as New Yorkers, we tend to avoid Times Square at all costs, but artist Peggy Ahwesh’s City Thermogram, has made it a destination spot for art lovers as well as tourists.

City Thermogram unveils both NYC’s electrical grid and the heat signatures of the human bodies that crowd its streets onto many of the largest billboards in the area. It’s a portrait of the urban everyday through the lens of a heat-sensitive camera. Using innovative technology, the piece recasts 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 reveals the dynamism of the human body and offers a heat-based visualization of the electrical power grid that we all operate within.

This is part of the Midnight Moment series, the largest coordinated effort in history by the sign operators in Times Square to display synchronized, cutting-edge creative content on electronic billboards and newspaper kiosks throughout Times Square every night.

What Sparks Our Fire: Innovative Art in Unexpected Places