ABSTRACT
The red dot of the laser-sighted weapon appears ubiquitous, a common trope of action movies, political thrillers, police procedurals, first-person shooter games, reality TV, and the nightly news. Yet even as it has become part of everyday realism, it remains a technology of speculative media, projecting an image of risk through a single ray of light, a tiny mote of illumination that speeds ahead and enjoins the present to catch up. In this essay, we follow the red dot as a media object—a phantasmatic figure of precision targeting—as well as the focal point of a way of seeing that is endemic to the era of laser weapons. This is what we call red dot sight: a mediated perspective, an orientation to risk that re-dimensionalizes the optics of threat perception around a crimson speck of light.
