Event Horizon, which shares its name with an astronomical term that means a theoretical point of no return associated with black holes, is a single-channel audiovisual piece that explores light bending. Simulated stars and nebulas drift and come in contact with an unseen force that results in a simulated light-bending effect called “gravitational lensing.” Gravitational lensing, which is closely associated with black holes or nearby galaxies, occurs when the space around an object bends the light surrounding it. In black holes, the event horizon can often represent the threshold between that which is knowable and that which is unexplored.  In this piece, the event horizon is the absolute limit of human perception, the point at which a dark, cosmological, posthuman infrastructure is felt through the bending of space and time.

While the scopophilic desire to puncture the limits of the visible might not define science as such, it nevertheless can be felt circulating within the amorphous body of knowledge produced in science’s name. Independent of whatever technology set up to serve it (astronomical, neurological, theological, artistic…), this desire carves gravitational centers of attention that, together, form what under the auspices of this issue could be called a dark infrastructure of science.

Like Novalis once asked “Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night?”, Diana Roja-Ponce’s Event Horizon turns this desire upon itself. Upon turning it, the perceived becomes the perceiver. Indeed, on the other side of the gravitational lens, what a black hole perhaps sees in our direction is something akin to the image of an owl that opens H.D.’s poem “Sagesse,” followed by the following lines: “You look at me, a hut or cage contains / your fantasy, your frantic stare.” Isn’t this, after all, science doing its duty? Considering that H.D.’s father was an astronomer, she knew very well of the draw of the dark skies and the desire to see something in the seeming nothingness. And what unfolds from darkness are strange wandering orbs we see in Event Horizon; orbs like eyes staring from the photo.