07/01/2026
For “Stroking the Void,” new fiction about a big hole in Santa Fe (and jerking off at the end of the world) by Ismail Ibrahim, Triple Canopy commissioned Clare Koury () to create accompanying imagery. Here’s what Koury had to say about it:
After reading “Stroking the Void,” I spent a few hours on Google Earth, remotely “exploring” the neighborhoods surrounding the cul-de-sac that Ismail Ibrahim describes at the beginning of the story. Interestingly, the two-block street that appears in the first paragraph turned up the highest concentration of on-the-ground light anomalies, which ranged from a scattering of prismatic rainbows to multi-tiered lens flares with varying degrees of geometric complexity. I liked imagining that Ibrahim had generated a kind of subtle gravitational irregularity on Brothers Street via his writing process, which produced its own form of optical lensing. I was especially pleased by the synchronicity of a neon green, alien-shaped lens flare hovering over a landscaping truck emblazoned with the word eclipse.
These flares reminded me of a trip I took to Arizona, where I met several people who were eager to show off similar light anomalies they’d captured on their iPhones. Some called these phenomena “angelic light beings,” while others referred to them as “inter-dimensional ascension portals.” Months later, on a road trip to Mount Shasta, I found myself analyzing prismatic light angels with the girl working the counter at a headshop, surrounded by fractal Alex Grey tapestries and bongs in the form of Rick and Morty.
In addition to the light anomalies along Brothers Street, I took some Google Earth stills and processed them through an iterative, open-source “black hole” program developed by researchers at Arizona State University who have been working with the Event Horizon Telescope. The program simulates gravitational lensing, which generates visuals that look like light looping in on itself. The simulations almost immediately begin to resemble a radionics circuit, a geometric pattern that is supposed to guide subtle or nonlocal energy flows.
