ending field notes
thank you
Dear reader,
Thank you for making it this far. We enjoyed the process of curating this collection, and we are excited for you to experience it with us.
In slam poet Franny Choi’s poem “introduction to quantum theory” in the Adroit Journal, she writes that we can enter into parallel universes, but only at the expense of disregarding our own reality. Her poem ends:
…by signing, you agree also to be responsible for the universe
where the oceans glow red, the universe where
what we call shadow is pulsing with the musk
of hooves, and especially the one in which
humans exist, but only in the nightmares
of small children. Will you hold that one too?
The version of the story that never learned
to consider sound? and the one where sound
is only the opposite of metal? and the one
where the sound of metal is never enough
to quiet the dead?
We wonder what reflections of our present world are literalized or extended within the possible futures of Nox and Lux that we have chosen to consider abstractly rather than work to fix within our reality. From this issue, we hope you will take away that fictional universes are stitched from reality. As Lieutenant Donovan questions in his notes to NASA, “Is anything ever really fiction?” There are no inequalities in our cities that we have not already noticed, no shortages and no pains and no terrors that lurk, visibly or invisibly, in our world. We have created fictional solutions to fictional problems, and fictional problems that have no solutions. In delving into the creation of CORTEX – and designing alternate universes – are we taking away time from examining microscopically the inequities of our present?
It is a privilege to stitch together a world of art, text, and sound, and it is a meditation and a mirror to what simmers in the backs of our minds each day – the questions that we wonder about, that we attempt to unravel. We are passive narrators to the great problems of our world. To be a writer, to be an artist, is an exercise in imaginative thinking – to take the trajectory of an issue that can slip through your hands like sand if you’re not careful enough to hold it, to extrapolate it into the breathless cliff of the future. We want to use the sublime to both awe and terrify; the concept of total illumination and total darkness represent the notions of the danger of extremism and the adaptive capabilities of humankind. Our first issue is a playground for hypothetical exercises in empathy. Stretch yourself across space, across time; warp your voice; like Franny Choi said, you are choosing to hold the version of the story that never considered sound, perhaps neglecting the one where the sound of metal is never enough to quiet the dead. But rather by entering into parallel universes, we can select and weave the causal points of our current world to allow someone else to step inside a discrete point in time or space where they can place their hands against the glass box of your skull and hear the pressure point of what makes you fear, what makes you dream.
As college students on the cusp of adulthood, we worked together to dream up this little world together. It is one that holds our questions about the Fermi Paradox, about energy consumption, about luxury stratification, about gentrification. It is one which questions the nature of binary. In order for light to exist, dark must, too; to what extent might we be able to control or ration who is allowed to be good? Manifest destiny is where the light of God, of the nation, reaches. Light is ownership, possession, vision, direction, orientation; it is prismatic, luminous, colorful, and dangerous. Darkness is haunted, uncertain, separated; it is liquid, mysterious, and tactile. We wanted to deconstruct this binary and recreate it manifested in two separate worlds, populated by people who believe that they belong to each one. Of course, we made this all up. But philosophers in the post-Reversal age questioned the existence of objects sans our direct perception. All of history is a collective memory that settles itself into the fabrics of our emotional histories and ingrains itself into our bones. Who’s to say that something just like Lux and Nox won’t occur in the future? We are responsible for each universe that we create, and we do it each day.
– Sarah Feng, Editor-in-Chief
by Anasthasia Shilov, Lead Illustrator
our process
We decided to embark upon this journey of creation together after the initial creation of CORTEX in late February of 2022, whose mission is simply to experiment through writing and science. We believe in the intersection of the sciences and the humanities to be a powerful force for questioning the systems around us and considering new modes of empathy, and we aimed to create an on-campus community that would be a collaborative group of creators. Each issue is themed, decided by the editors for that cycle. For our inaugural cycle, we chose to create a collaborative universe. We first debated between writing about one city, scaling up from the molecule to the government, creating narratives from character to character, and separating the pieces into a chronological timeline of the universe.
Ultimately, after much discussion, our team of 12 editors decided upon the theme of light vs. dark – considering two different worlds thrust into two extremes. When one major factor such as the constant source of power, heat, and energy in the world is either destroyed or turned infinite, how does the ripple effect of this one shift radiate throughout the past, present, and future? How do we think in the dark; how do we talk in the light? How is power commodified, sold, and exploited? What do we worship when we cannot see? What does music sound like when all we can rely on is sound? From the architecture of buildings conserving the luxury of electricity to the lack of circadian rhythms for clocks now synchronized to the tides, we spent many meetings deciding on the pivot points of the world: what a city looks like, how they function, how people communicate. Upon deciding these together, we branched off to write rough drafts of our own portions of the world, whether those were fictional narratives or artifacts. In the editing process, we wrote new pieces that filled in gaps between these other pieces and smoothed out factual continuities, taking inspiration from one another and using each other’s characters.
Each artifact notes at its start that it is collected, translated, discovered, or re-created by a member of our team. Each of these words means that this person wrote or created this piece of the issue. Multiple names together means a collaboration for writing or a differentiation between the writer and the artist or photographer. All writing, art, and content is original, created by our own team collaboratively! We attribute our background research in our artist statement’s below. The exception to this is Color of Void, where the black-and-white photographs of statues were taken from Unsplash, a public domain website. However, the illustration was still done by a CORTEX illustrator.
This project was completed in partnership with Yale University and funded by Trumbull College, to whom we would like to extend our deepest thanks.
about our team
Jordan Davidson (Yale College ‘25 – writing for Three Steps to Salvation, E-Flat Major, Descending, The First Steps to Starting a Plant Union) would like to think that she occasionally has good ideas. Whether others would agree with that statement is questionable: was collecting many many gnomes in her dorm room the most brilliant proposition since not just slicing but cubing bread? Probably not. But it was very entertaining. She’s studying Humanities and Applied Physics, and if you ask her what the crossover is, she’ll probably give you a very long, rehearsed answer: it’s the only thing she can ever say that’s remotely interesting thing she said at the only cocktail party she’s ever been to. In addition to being a CORTEX fiction editor, she’s also a staff writer for GenZ Writes, and her work has been published in Class Collective, Aster Lit, and pastel serenity, among others, and is upcoming in various anthologies and other publications.
An artist’s statement:
Jordan has taken most of the science in her pieces from various articles she read but has long since forgotten the name of. The have left her with a imprint of the ultimate truth…actually, she tries to build off of the normal world as much as possible because that’s where the best science is, but sometimes she has to throw in a sentient plant or two (that’s where the articles on fungal networks come in).
Sarah Feng (Yale College ‘25 – writing for Color of Void, blood-colored bones of peaches, As We Collided, Makeshift Depths, Map of New Junction Norwich, Connecticut) is a rising sophomore in Trumbull College studying Humanities and Neuroscience. She is interested in how the mind works to process and create art. She loves speculative fiction by Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro. In the past, she worked as the editor-in-chief of COUNTERCLOCK. At Yale, she is also involved in the Yale Farm, Trick Mirrors, a piano-poetry collective, and the Yale Daily News Magazine. Her work is in the Adroit Journal, DIALOGIST, Indianapolis Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and more. She is originally from Northern California, where she enjoys dark chocolate, hiking in the rain, and Californian poppies. During high school, she spent most of her time reading and writing; at Yale, she has realized she is equally as interested in the neuroscientific mechanisms of how those words are produced and assigned to abstract ideas.
An artist’s statement:
“With Color of Void, I was inspired by Margaret Atwood, who authored the Handmaid’s Tale. I wanted to play with belief that extends beyond a narrative format. In her novel, individuals who worshiped the fertility of women removed the humanity of their objects of worship.The neocortex is a highly flexible organ: when sensory inputs are modified, the processing modalities inside of the brain change to accommodate. For example, animals who have body parts amputated show cortical change in which the receptive fields of adjacent body parts acquire more and more sensitivity within the processing unit of the brain. In a world where sight is given priority over everything, where shadows and darkness are minimized and light is eternal, it is possible that human’s eyes would adapt much further to survive better in this environment. As such, these girls can see colors that we as humans do not have names for. Yet their physical vision is belied by the ignorance they have for the true purpose of the sacrifice, which is to decrease the strength of Sight in the population so that the elders may maintain control of the cult. To see is not to understand; sight can betray you with internalized blindness.
With blood-colored bones of peaches, I was inspired by studies which have shown that in blind individuals, their visual cortex is activated by using auditory senses to localize sounds in space. Visual processing areas of the brain are activated upon reading of Braille, signifying that the visual processing algorithms in the mind have been linked to sonical input modalities. In essence, they use sound to see. The keeper of this library is able to use sound and his other senses to generate his own ideas of color, navigating this world with dexterity as he has always been blind. Spatial poetry loses form in the darkness, so I wanted to experiment with how light is used to streamline, to package, and to reflect.
With Makeshift Depths, I was inspired by the documentary Sonic Sea, about how whalesongs, used to echolocate and communicate with other whales, have been drowned out by technology, and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which builds on the poetic beauty of radio communication. The narrator’s descent into the depths mirrors her entry into the memory of her past as she clutches onto her memory and attempts to let go of it.”
Spencer Greenfield (Yale College ‘25 – scientific illustration for Solar Diagram, writing for Environmental Memory) is a Physics and Geosciences major. He has a scientific background in astrophysics, and he’s now growing interested in how he can channel these interests to make an impact on the climate crisis. He also loves music, science and technology studies, creative writing, and his 13-year-old dog Sasha. Joining CORTEX has been such a great opportunity to explore all of his interests together, and it’s been a treat engaging with all the amazingly talented people on the CORTEX team.
An artist’s statement:
“With a growing interest in environmental science, I could imagine the drastic environmental consequences of the Great Reversal, even in worlds where technology is advanced enough to keep society functioning. In my Environmental Memory piece, I thought it was important to tell the human story of these changes. I was inspired by Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘Inventory,’ which tells an apocalyptic tale through vignettes intimate in scope and sexuality.
My other piece is the Solar Diagram, and it was a challenge to balance the science fiction concept of the Great Reversal with the rules of orbital mechanics. There were a few gems in the research process, though, that fueled my imagination. I discovered that “Scholz’s Star” passed through our galactic neighborhood approximately 70,000 years ago, disrupting the Oort Cloud in the far reaches of the solar system (Mamajek et al. 2015). Perhaps more interestingly, Bojnordi-Arbab & Rahvar (2021) found that the probability of a rogue star destabilizing Earth’s orbit is 0.044% in 4 billion years. This seems incredibly unlikely on a local scale, but on the massive scale of the universe, planets’ orbits could be destabilized quite frequently. The probability even increases for systems in places of higher density, like near centers of galaxies (the “bulge”) and globular clusters. I cannot speak to the likelihood of such a rogue star becoming a binary system with an accompanying planet in stable orbit, but it was not difficult to imagine that somewhere in the universe, such a system exists. Perhaps somewhere out there, Lux and Nox are waiting.”
Roxana Grunenwald (Yale College ‘25 – writing for the Ten Commandments, As We Collided, Deathness, Palindrome, Blink, Immortal Sight) is studying Philosophy and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. When she is not evaluating the meaning of life, her thoughts are rather engaged with attempts to prove existence and knowledge (or, better yet, attempts to prove knowledge of existence).
Within the scope of CORTEX Magazine, she hopes to evoke lengthy introspection in readers about what it means to be alive by advancing "unanswerable" questions that are too often shied away from, with hopes to enable readers to better position themselves in their world by considering the nature of their interactions with their surroundings and with themselves. Topics of keen interest include life and death, immortality and eternality, time, innate vs. experientially-acquired knowledge, creation, value, and existence and nonexistence as a binary. She is grateful for her other brilliant Cortex members with their wealth of knowledge and creative faculties, and wishes upon them – and upon readers – the fantastic delight of existential crises twice daily – one for the day and one for the night. ;)
An artist’s statement:
“The language of matter and void and ideas expressed in Ten Commandments are directly derived from Epicurean philosophy, but with the added element of Force – the Light force and the Dark force. The Epicureans wish for causes and effects to be determined and free will (which seems to contradict causal determinism), and they reconcile the two by introducing a ‘swerve’ in material atoms that enables everything to have a cause and free will to exist. This swerve itself, however, seems uncaused, and thus I wanted to renovate Epicurean ideology to include a cause of the randomness in the worlds, which became the Forces rather than the atomic swerve, while also inserting into the creation story moral directives that kindle the candle allusion referenced in later works, most notably in As We Collided.
For As We Collided, I deliberately selected Angèlique's and Alexandre's names to add to the aura of light both within themselves and within their eternally light world. As if Angel were the ‘chosen one,’ I gave her acute sensory awareness of the Great Reversal, and as I love playing around with the idea of knowledge and sensory experience and which is given priority, I wanted Angel to experience the Great Reversal within herself as it occurs around her, without her necessarily knowing exactly what was happening at the time – hence, her home as the Clear Castle; what happens without also happens within, and what is within is, too, without. The irony of Angel's middle name as ‘seeing’ though she grows progressively blind motivates her blindness as bestowing her with the "immortal sight" of her imagination, and her lullaby with poetic structure and rhyme scheme directly derived from the Immortal Sight poem only strengthens this association; in a world of eternal light, the sensory overload of sight is too much to bear such that the only escape into true sight is to escape into imagination, depicted through Angel's blindness. As for Alexandre, his middle name of ‘he who spreads the good word,’ despite his bearing of the bad news to Thomas of Angel's death, does bring to Thomas closure, peace, and eternal love and friendship, which is ultimately the good Thomas seeks. Contrasting with Angel's and Alexandre's privilege both in birth and solar matters, Thomas has no special wordplay in the construction of his name, to further underscore how normal, relatable, and imperfect he is – tortured soul and regrets and all – highlighting that the same love, pain, and strife over eternity afflicts us all, regardless of whether we are engraced by status or by soul; as if maybe we all, too, live in a Clear Castle, with nothing to shield us from our own emotions.”
Hailey Schoelkopf (Yale College '23 – writing for Linguistic Structures, Luxury Home Listings) is a Computer Science and Mathematics major at Yale. She is interested in Natural Language Processing and how we can model human language with computers (and its fundamental limitations). She grew up reading science fiction authors including Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert. Ask her any time and she would love to spend hours talking about the field of Natural Language Processing, language models, AI, and anything else related!
An artist’s statement:
In addition to playfully exploring how the meaning of luxury might change in alternative worlds and futures, her work in Cortex has focused firstly on language via Speech Act Theory, that is, how language is used as a tool in social interaction beyond simple semantic meaning, and how the pragmatics and conversational dynamics of language might be affected by the overabundance of light / dark.
She would recommend https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/ for an introduction to the idea of Speech Acts in the linguistic subfield of Pragmatics, though she is quite far from an expert or well-read on the topic whatsoever.
Suraj Singareddy (Yale College ‘25 – Proverbs of Day, Proverbs of Night, the Oresteia) is a rising sophomore in Timothy Dwight from Atlanta-ish, GA. Outside of CORTEX, he's also involved in Negative Space, does some theatre stuff here and there, and is an advocate for the rule of threes. You can often find him hunched over at his desk reading graphic novels or poetry.
An artist’s statement:
“This translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia was an effort to examine how translation is an act of modernizing and fitting something old to a new system of knowledge. We chose to focus on this piece, specifically Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian's translation of it, under the assumption that what had held up so far (in the Western world) would hold up for another few hundred years. We also drew some inspiration for Shapiro and Burian's translation in that their work looked to infuse more modern and poetic meaning into an ancient text, which is exactly what we attempted to do but with an imagined future. After completing an initial translation that modified the monologue to the circumstances of Lux and Nox, we then swapped pieces and translated each others' work as if 400 years had passed, thereby bringing in a temporal element to the language.
With my proverbs, I wanted to attempt writing proverbs as a way of examining how humans ascribe morals and other values to our physical circumstances. I began by laying out the barebones of these morals and values, taking inspiration from Greek mythology in my personification of night. The physical feeling, which often forms the basis of how we understand the world, of existing in these worlds was important in this initial stage. Storms, rather than seeming destructive, might be seen as a form of relief from the never-ending sunlight and therefore morally good. For the style of the proverbs themselves, I looked to short sayings from Christianity, Buddhism and other religions as inspiration.”
Hannah Szabó (Yale College ‘25 – writing for Linguistic Structures, the Oresteia, Map of New Junction Norwich, Connecticut) is a member of the class of 2025 in Pauli Murray college, double-majoring in Computer Science and Comparative Literature, an intersectional interest that she discovered through an independent Digital Humanities / Natural Language Processing project in high school.. She is interested in studying all sorts of systems of communication from human language to mathematical logic, and loves finding spaces like CORTEX that explore intersections like those between humanities // technology, creative storytelling // data-driven arguments, artistic endeavors // logical proofs. Outside of CORTEX, she also edits for the Yale Herald and the Yale Historical Review, and is involved with the undergraduate radio station (WYBC). For this issue, she was inspired by visionary world-builders like H. G. Wells, innovative translators like Emily Wilson, and, of course, by many of her classmates and professors here at Yale.
Katherine Chou (Yale College ‘25 – writing for the social theory cycle of love & dying) is a rising sophomore in Silliman studying Neuroscience and toying with the idea of English with a creative writing concentration. She is interested in technology policy, the AI alignment issue, similar misalignments in human decision-making, and exploring the future impacts/dangers of AI that our present should be imagining. Katherine also enjoys falling into the YouTube rabbithole while complaining about the nefarious algorithm.
An artist’s statement:
“I wanted to write a story about how ordinary people react to the prospects of the world changing, in nonbelief, or even perhaps belief that it’ll be for the better — and the consequences of that optimism gone wrong. I wanted to touch on how belief in technology and leadership fluxes.
I overlayed reactions I imagine we have in crises with stages of falling in love, particularly in an abusive relationship. We see this cycle of forgetting throughout our history — the many nuclear close calls that had us at the edge of nuclear annihilation, how little the U.S. puts into pandemic prevention despite the warning shot COVID-19 provided. We don’t always know when something big is happening, and we don’t think it will be so bad, until it is happening and is that bad. We are unprepared, not just with our tech, but more importantly with human answers of our abstract desires: what we want to hold onto, our "oughts" what we want to feel, how we should react.”
Emily Cai (Yale College ‘25 – art for Color of Void, E-Flat Major, Descending, The First Steps to Starting a Plant Union, Luxury Home Listings) is an artist whose work explores ideas of memory and retro-futurism. With digital tools, she creates surreal interpretations of the natural world. Her pieces stem from the botanical illustrations and diagrams that accompanied scientific text prior to photography.
Karen Lin (Yale College ‘24 – art for Makeshift Depths) is Computer Science and History of Art. She is interested in finding ways to embed art and design within digital spaces. With a background in studio art, she finds finds solace in the motions of creating visual art, whether it be the repetition of a craft or the precision of moments on a canvas. An avid consumer of science fiction, Karen loves engaging with the Cortex community to add to her ever-growing reading list and ruminate on life and our small roles in society. In addition to being a Cortex Illustrator, she’s also drawn for the Yale Daily News and Yale Scientific Magazine.
An artist’s statement:
Empathy for stories and meaningful conversations drives Karen to work with writers to turn their words into a visual language. She looks towards texture and contour in particular to express emotion, and found mixed media to meaningfully convey the collection of artifacts, documents, and diaries found in this inaugural CORTEX issue.
Anasthasia Shilov (Yale College ‘23 – art and design for each piece in this issue) is from the Chicagoland area, studying Chemistry and Art. She is interested in many themes: the spaces of ambiguity, the hive mind, found objects, subtle queerness, muchness, beauty and disgust. She is currently working at the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage on photography conservation and is involved with other campus groups such as the Yale Herald, Women+ In Chemistry, and the teaching labs at SCL.
An artist’s statement:
“Many pieces dealt with things that were intangible, transparent, and hidden. And to design images for this issue, it meant that I would have to think beyond the constraints of an illustrator and work in an entirely different way. In a world where human beings are losing their sight, what repercussions would that have on our visual depictions of the world? As I worked, I found motifs that tied many works together, including mirroring, high-contrast, touch, and the visualization of sound: a ribbon fluttering in the wind.”
join us
Want to create and explore with us in the fall?
Tell us about yourself here. What universes do you want to investigate?