Somatic by Ella T. '25

This year, I made a spread for MIT’s Infinite Magazine. The magazine was released in May, but I was hosed, and now that I am hosed but in a different way, I feel like I have time to write about it.

I’ve been a part of Infinite since I came to MIT, and I highly recommend it. There’s a role for everyone. During my first semester, I met someone who joined solely because he was obsessed with typeface. Like obsessed with fonts…

If you’re interested, there are already some well-written MIT blogs about Infinite and Infinite’s new little sister MIT Gala.

This year, the theme of the magazine was Rebirth. At first, I had no idea what I wanted to do with that. But I did know that inside me there are two demons.

Demon #1 – Any opportunity I have to pitch an idea to an organization is an opportunity for me to host a comedy special.

Demon #2 – These people are giving me money for materials, and I want to know what it is like to buy nice yarn.

And my spread, Somatic, was born. It initially didn’t have that name. I think someone on the board called it Mortal Shell, which I thought was ridiculous, but I stuck with that name until a few weeks before release, when I asked Chat-GPT to name it for me.

The inspiration for Somatic was that I wanted to crochet organs and then affix them to humans. I thought it would be funny.

Also, without getting too 6-9, I’ve always been fascinated with the levels of abstraction that exist within the physical form. For most people, you don’t have to learn anything about your body for your body to work. And yet, it does. And you can just walk around with the understanding that the body is a sack of liquid and flesh. And trillions of cells will conduct incredibly complex processes regardless. And even the people who have dedicated their entire lives to studying the body and the mind will die with some of these complex processes left undiscovered.

Less philosophically, I also thought about these:

Anyways, here is the spread! I will include the names of the models below, but I would also like to give a special thanks to my photographer Marina T. ’25, and editor Angelica Z. ’26. And if the quality is bad it is because I screenshotted it from a PDF, which you can find in better resolution at the website I linked above!