White-Hot is a series of three audio interviews, which explore the optical, legal, and ideological apparatus of the Infra-Red gaze. Thermal cameras have long penetrated consumer-based markets and pop-culture. In the presented interviews with a drone sensor operator, a criminal defense attorney, and a media scholar, Keren asks us to look closely at the militarized aspects and consequences of a temperature-based visual regime. Attorney Kenneth Lerner discusses America’s Fourth Amendment and thermal technology’s threat to privacy. Brandon Bryant, who served in the US Air Force, shares his daunting military experience using infrared cameras. Between infrared’s white-hot and black-cold polarities, Bryant describes humans transforming into targets, as if in shadow puppetry. MIT theorist Lisa Parks argues that a transition is taking place in which a visual regime based on visible light is shifting into a regime based on temperature, and considers how temperature-based optics affect conceptions of racial and ethnic differences and the registration and perception of violence and death.
*These interviews were originally shown as part of Tali Keren’s solo exhibition ״Heat Signature״ in New York.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
