The School of the Event Horizon (aka SOTEH) was a collaborative project between artists Kate Pickering, Emily Rosamond and Steven Levon Ounanian from 2014-2016. The School existed as a fictional yet functional organisation, suspended at the edge of a black hole, and formed of a shifting group of departments and characters that morphed according to need.

School of the Event Horizon Mission Statement:
The School of the Event Horizon may or may not be teetering on the edge of a black hole, depending on your viewpoint. It is situated in a place and time where place and time become unhinged. Pickering, Rosamond and Ounanian attempt to harness the black hole's propensity to warp and mutate space-time. Performing the rites of a past/future order, they reassemble corrupted facts, retrieve what might have been lost, and set about the tasks of sifting, connecting, destroying and reconstructing information.

The School examines the application of extreme gravitational force to objects of study, to the point at which these objects condense, break down and re-combine with other objects. In such states, relationships between ideas and their material substrates become liquid: both tend toward pure information. In the process of this liquefaction, waves of fiction ripple through objects, reworking their histories and future. Time becomes elastic and reversible.

True Stories from the Event Horizon (2014) Multi-media installation and live performances.

SOTEH's first exhibition True Stories from the Event Horizon was part of TRIALOGUES, a Peer Sessions residency series held at ASC Gallery (London). The School created a fictive space within the gallery, entered into through a disorienting pitch black corridor, at the end of which a circular video projection approximated the experience of being drawn into the vortex of a black hole. Once inside, visitors encountered a School Open Day consisting of three ongoing live performances. Rosamond enacted The Department of Objects to be Shrunk to a Single Point, with Weather Vane, formed of a series of suspended and floor based sculptures, text work and an arm which performed various gestures and objects through a hole in the wall. Human Resources (Ounanian) provided an introduction to the various departments, through multiple personalities and voices, and a ritual dance. Pickering's Department of Gravitational Fiction comprised a wall based drawing of a vortex diagram, over which images of various holes were projected, live drawing of a series of black holes, interspersed with the reading of a text in which time loops and falls back in on itself.

Beyond this first exhibition, the School of the Event Horizon collaborated on several other works:

The Oracular Sponge (2014) Product packaging, press release and performance.

The School of the Event Horizon were invited to contribute to an exhibition at Tenderpixel (London) entitled before breakfast we talked about the furthest visible point before it all disappeared. We devised a new product with predictive technologies that can be attached to the head, entitled The Oracular Sponge (Version 003.1a), and held a product launch with a lecture and demonstration. SOTEH also produced a limited edition print (Oracular Sponge Output: Time Granulation Cross Section) for Tenderbooks, and contributed research material to a Tenderbooks publication (Point of Divergence One: before breakfast conversations).

Lloyds. Get Your Own Whistle (2014) Text and installation (dimensions variable).

The School of the Event Horizon spent a week at TAP (Southend) on the Liminal Space residency. We produced a script of fragmented experimental texts entitled Lloyds. Get Your Own Whistle, in which we explored the idea that the Lloyds Building in London had turned inside out, linking it with Southend's Essex House, the site of a former Lloyds bank support centre. The text was installed and performed at the closing event for the residency, at which we also delivered a public writing workshop.

Akrasia (2015) Text with images.

SOTEH produced Akrasia (2015), after an invitation to contribute to the sixth edition of EROS journal, on the theme of Homotopia, or place-of-the-same. In this collaborative text with images, the consciousness of a luxury housing development at Aldgate East is explored. Additionally, SOTEH performed Akrasia at Art15 art fair and Tenderbooks for the launch of the Homotopia edition.