Calling liminalism the "defining" aesthetic of our time is a bit much (though I get the article is trying to hitch its wagon to the Backrooms, aka the "current popular thing"). It's an aesthetic microniche, about as popular as vaporwave, or cyberpunk, grunge, or Y2K (think flip phones, bulky plastic cameras, etc.). There's a ton of these, and some are surprising: for example, there's even been a relatively recent revival of the "old-money" aesthetic, especially motivated by fashion brands like Rowing Blazers, etc.
Ive always felt that the Art World seems to talk in its own tone. And that tone is arrogant, looking down on people, and haughtiness. Words dont mean with the Art World as they normally do. And definitions are scarce, since you are expected to innately know them, or be 'out'.
> The image exemplifies the popular internet aesthetic of “liminality”: the exploration of spaces that appear “in between,” that are uncanny and uncomfortable despite being mundane or familiar.
Liminal in the context of liminal dreaming has very different emotional connotations. Liminal dreaming is the state where you are beginning to fall asleep but are not quite there (hence liminal because you're on the border between awake and asleep). You can also experience it at the end of a sleep as you transition back into being awake. It's a flowing place where colors, shapes, and sounds keep morphing in very interesting and often beautiful ways. Unlike lucid dreaming there is no notion of being in control. Supposedly this was a secret to the creativity of Dali. He would sit in a chair with some keys in his hand and allow himself to drift off. When he fell asleep the keys would fall out of his hand, hit the floor, and the sound would wake him up. Then he would draw whatever he had been imagining during the liminal dreaming right there on the spot. Edison supposedly also had a similar trick. Supposedly. I have sometimes imagined some really beautiful (and catchy!) music but I've never been able to remember it in detail after waking.
I don’t think it’s as directly attributable to “late capitalism,” as the article suggests. I speculated on a few ideas:
- We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals
- Nostalgia
- Our Cities are Transportation Networks
- Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal
- The Death of God
- We Lack a Process-Oriented Language
Yeah, no. I'd say we're still looking for the most inexpensive variant of Modernism 125+ years after it's introduction - aesthetic driven entirely by the capabilities of machines that created it, embodied by Apple, every look-alike 4-door SUV, and anticontextual urban ruins of oversized-tiled econoboxes warehouses.
Funny, because the Celts, who came up with the idea of thin spaces long before it was cool, did see coastlines as a kind of border between worlds (in a supernatural way, not just the mundane border between land and sea).
Yeah as I was making my shitpost I realized that a coastline entirely meets the actual definition of "liminal" (as opposed to the common usage, "teens pretending to be scared by an empty office break room")
It's so weird to open a page on HN and see a photo of a place that I went to all the time as a child, but as some kind of abandoned-space porn for Zoomers (Century III mall).
There's an interesting connection to draw between liminal spaces (especially the Backrooms variety) and the "latent space" concept from AI, both mechanically and sociologically. Basically, generative AI is an industrial-scale blend of almost every image and concept in human history, and within the labyrinthine, uninterpretable neural networks that power it, you can "find" every conceivable combination of objects, styles, and features. It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled by a process that even its creators do not fully understand. Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon and churns out endless copies and imitations, each a little more degraded and disconnected from the original intention than the last. Like the way McMansions echo traditional architectural features, but shrunken, toylike, and not fit for purpose beyond a vague signaling at wealth and taste. In a society that feels increasingly overrun by these kinds of blind processes and cultural distillations, an aesthetic that connects it to a physical place (and one that happens to resemble so many anonymous places around the world and in our collective dreams and memories) is bound to be compelling. And how appropriate that it came to prominence not through any particular creator, but through an anonymous post expounded on via the internet.
The thing that introduced me to the aesthetics of liminal spaces was a video about the DOOM mod "MyHouse.WAD"[0], it's a technical fascination as much as it is an aesthetic one. There is no mention of it in the article, despite 18M views on YouTube. It was inspired by the novel House of Leaves[1], released in 2000, which "redefined modern horror".
I think that aesthetic follows a natural progression from creepypasta[2], mixed with some nostalgia for the eeriness playing Resident Evil-type of games as a kid, the satisfying feeling to watch empires collapse, going nowhere yet being nowhere, and the constant desire of the internet to long for niche cultures.
MyHouse.WAD is a genuine work of art. Anybody who is even tangentially interested in video games as an artistic medium should look into it, because it really is astounding.
this reminds me of Kenopsia:
the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
(ref. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
I know the trend from the LiminalSpace subreddit. It's nice to scroll through, peaceful yet slightly unsettling. But I think a lot of that effect comes less from the physical "in-between-ness" of the spaces and more from the fact that they are places you would expect to have people, but which don't. The article notes this but only in passing. You never see a photo of a busy corridor, for example. They are always empty which is what gives them that uncanny feeling. I went over to that subreddit now and there are even a couple of photos of people's homes, which are surely the opposite of liminal spaces. But they appear not only empty but also anachronistic (with, eg, 70s decor or older wallpaper) which also seems to be a trend with this aesthetic.
I don't think "no people" should be seen as a hard rule. The Hopper paintings mentioned in the article, for instance, usually have a few people in them, and yet he's clearly aiming for the same thing as modern liminal spaces pictures and achieving it. Hopper paintings have only become more unsettling with time, because they feel so modern, like that was yesterday, when you know that objectively it was over 100 years ago.
I run an off grid metal working business on an old salt water farm, the guy trying to help me with getting my back office up to date is tradeing his skills for a room in a Karate dojo that is housed in a defunct bank
inside a semi dormant mall, he and the Karate master also come and work at my shop doing metal work, and he is constantly pulling out his phone to talk to grock or claude building an app, and generating letters for business purposes, but back to the same mall, waaaaaaaaay at the other end is a thrift store where may be found books, often cast off from university students leaving behind there uncracked textbooks on
everything, including computer science, which seems quaint, and fitting in the dead mall setting.
edit: cant be complete without
it just feels like nostalgia for the 90s. we all remember those empty malls and airports before smartphones took over our attention. it is comforting in a weird way.
My favorite example of liminalism is Everything Empty Always Alone, a man on YouTube in his 40s who claims to be a time traveler and films himself walking and driving around empty metropolitan areas. He claims he’s recording from some sort of alternate universe, but it’s likely he’s just at these locations at odd hours. In any case, it’s fun outsider art. Or maybe it’s all true you never know.
to me it seems exactly the same as urban exploration photography, except limited only to corporate spaces. or Portal and The Stanley Parable combined with creepypasta. personally, i don't find the aesthetic nostalgic because i went to school in a former office building... but whatever, if it makes people happy, i can't judge them.
Years and years ago, I took a photo set of the Santa Cruz boardwalk and all of its beautifully painted buildings and rides, in the middle of January when it was completely and utterly devoid of people. I think I encountered one person the entire visit. I was thrilled because it let me add a second album to my collection of “places that are gorgeous and deserve photographs taken of them without all those annoying people in the way”, and I celebrated the reactions from people. Which were, more or less, that is was incredibly weird to see it portrayed in perfectly normal lighting and color and tone, but missing the one thing that everyone takes for granted: passersby.
Anyways, I reawoke this old dead account (I have since changed names everywhere, here too) so I can link the album and talk about it. Not because I care about appreciation of my photos, but because as an early adopter of the trend, I found it was possible to create the eeriness of today’s ’liminal spaces’ without the ‘lifeless’ characteristics of the Backrooms, House of Leaves, an so on. It’s a lot easier to create that feeling with decay, with monotonality, with cookie-cutter cubicle mazes; and, the theory tends to connect with people more readily as plausible if you include ‘rotted by time and age’ to justify the emptiness as Horizon Zero Dawn and Last of Is both lovingly demonstrated.
But at the core of all of this modern liminal, is portraying human-dense spaces as human-zero, and then confronting the eternal question that haunts humanity: “What happens in the dark forest when no humans are observing?” Whether it’s a cubicle maze or a carnival ride, as the world grows more and more crowded and lonely, it’s no wonder that we want to spy on our busiest spaces after we’ve all gone home for the day. What do they get up to? Where did all the people go? Is this merely a painting of a screaming person on a wall, or is this space empty because they were consumed?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] threadLiminal in the context of liminal dreaming has very different emotional connotations. Liminal dreaming is the state where you are beginning to fall asleep but are not quite there (hence liminal because you're on the border between awake and asleep). You can also experience it at the end of a sleep as you transition back into being awake. It's a flowing place where colors, shapes, and sounds keep morphing in very interesting and often beautiful ways. Unlike lucid dreaming there is no notion of being in control. Supposedly this was a secret to the creativity of Dali. He would sit in a chair with some keys in his hand and allow himself to drift off. When he fell asleep the keys would fall out of his hand, hit the floor, and the sound would wake him up. Then he would draw whatever he had been imagining during the liminal dreaming right there on the spot. Edison supposedly also had a similar trick. Supposedly. I have sometimes imagined some really beautiful (and catchy!) music but I've never been able to remember it in detail after waking.
https://onthearts.com/p/what-are-liminal-spaces-and-why-are
I don’t think it’s as directly attributable to “late capitalism,” as the article suggests. I speculated on a few ideas:
- We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals - Nostalgia - Our Cities are Transportation Networks - Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal - The Death of God - We Lack a Process-Oriented Language
Anyway you might find it interesting!
This stuff is maybe more liminal: https://x.com/PenguinWeb3/status/2063196355011424582?s=20
I think that aesthetic follows a natural progression from creepypasta[2], mixed with some nostalgia for the eeriness playing Resident Evil-type of games as a kid, the satisfying feeling to watch empires collapse, going nowhere yet being nowhere, and the constant desire of the internet to long for niche cultures.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wAo54DHDY0
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves#Legacy
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepypasta
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NuSbELCNloc
https://www.youtube.com/@EverythingEmptyAlwaysAlone/videos
Also, most of the images in the article don’t actually invoke the liminal spaces feeling.
Anyways, I reawoke this old dead account (I have since changed names everywhere, here too) so I can link the album and talk about it. Not because I care about appreciation of my photos, but because as an early adopter of the trend, I found it was possible to create the eeriness of today’s ’liminal spaces’ without the ‘lifeless’ characteristics of the Backrooms, House of Leaves, an so on. It’s a lot easier to create that feeling with decay, with monotonality, with cookie-cutter cubicle mazes; and, the theory tends to connect with people more readily as plausible if you include ‘rotted by time and age’ to justify the emptiness as Horizon Zero Dawn and Last of Is both lovingly demonstrated.
But at the core of all of this modern liminal, is portraying human-dense spaces as human-zero, and then confronting the eternal question that haunts humanity: “What happens in the dark forest when no humans are observing?” Whether it’s a cubicle maze or a carnival ride, as the world grows more and more crowded and lonely, it’s no wonder that we want to spy on our busiest spaces after we’ve all gone home for the day. What do they get up to? Where did all the people go? Is this merely a painting of a screaming person on a wall, or is this space empty because they were consumed?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/floatingatoll/albums/721576328...