A 48 hour sketch.

Las Vegas trades in surfaces: the glittering façades, the strategic lighting, the carefully curated personas. But what happens when we look through a lens that is physically incapable of seeing these manufactured veneers? Using a basic thermal camera, the kind typically used for building inspections, I documented two days and nights along the Strip and its casinos, dissolving these constructs into the stark physics of human experience. Unable to register the light and color of Vegas's surface spectacle, it maps instead an intimate thermal topology. In the gaming halls, this consumer-grade inspection technology, designed to detect dangerous electrical hot spots, loose and corroded connections, resistance at connection points, and imminent system failures, reveals analogous patterns in human behavior. Like an overloaded circuit, bodies radiate their points of stress and friction: sex workers posed against casino walls, elderly pilgrims in motorized chairs making their slot machine rounds, tourists stumbling with long tubes of frozen drinks, street hustlers with their choreographed gestures.

We are all radiating bodies moving through space, and just as loose connections create heat through electrical resistance, human energy flow and friction manifests in thermal signatures. Bodies cluster in constellations around gaming tables like overheating junction boxes, each gradient revealing the physics of hope and fear. Where cold slot machines recede into darkness, the anxious warmth of a gambler's hands and flushed face become the brightest points in the frame, hot spots of human circuitry under load. This practical technology, designed to find system failures and dangerous heat buildup, instead maps an intimate geography of human resistance and overload in this fantasy landscape. Here, every presence becomes a signal of our animal nature: predation, intoxication, and the ritualized performance of vice, each radiating their own signature of effort, exhaustion, tension, and release.