Liminal space (aesthetic)

Internet aesthetic capturing empty and often transitional places From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Internet aesthetics, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition, pertaining to the concept of liminality.

Photo of liminal space
An empty hotel hallway, an example of a liminal space

Research from the Journal of Environmental Psychology has indicated that liminal spaces may appear eerie or strange because they fall into an uncanny valley of architecture and physical places.[1] An article from Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture has attributed this eeriness to some familiar places lacking their usually observed context.[2] A pillar of liminal spaces is the absence of living things, particularly other people, with the implication that the viewer is alone; this lack of presence is characteristic of spaces that are "liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another."[3]

The aesthetic gained popularity in 2019 after a post on 4chan which depicted a liminal space called The Backrooms went viral. Since then, liminal space images have been posted across the Internet, including on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok.

Characteristics

Broadly, the term liminal space is used to describe a place or state of change or transition; this may be physical (e.g. a doorway) or psychological (e.g. the period of adolescence).[4] Liminal space imagery often depicts this sense of "in-betweenness", capturing transitional places (such as stairwells, roads, corridors, or hotels) unsettlingly devoid of people.[5] The aesthetic may convey moods of eeriness, surrealness, nostalgia, or sadness, and elicit responses of both comfort and unease.[6]

This corridor at Disney's Contemporary Resort is a transitional space that may be considered liminal.

Research by Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University has attributed the unsettling nature of liminal spaces to the phenomenon of the uncanny valley. The term, which is usually applied to humanoids whose inexact resemblance to humans elicits feelings of unease, may explain similar responses to liminal imagery. In this case, physical places that appear familiar but subtly deviate from reality create the sense of eeriness typical of liminal spaces.[1]

Image of empty classroom
An empty classroom, normally only observed when full of students, may appear uncanny.

Peter Heft of Pulse: the Journal of Science and Culture further explores this sense of eeriness. Drawing on the works of Mark Fisher, Heft explains such eeriness may be felt when an individual views a situation in a different context to what they expect. For example, a schoolhouse, expected to be a busy amalgamation of teachers and students, becomes unsettling when depicted as unnaturally empty. This "failure of presence" was considered by Fisher to be one of the hallmarks of the aesthetic experience of eeriness.[2]

Part of the appeal of liminal spaces has been due to the coinciding of their boom in popularity with the COVID-19 pandemic and adjacent nostalgia for a time before the new normal, "which has made people more aware of transitional spaces and the emotions they evoke."[3] The first spike in popularity for liminal space imagery was in March of 2020, when the lockdowns were initiated.[7]

History

An image of the Backrooms. A large, open room with carpet, fluorescent lights and yellow wallpaper. A gap in the wall shows similar rooms extending without limits.
The original depiction of The Backrooms

The concept of liminality was first developed by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep's 1884 publication Les Rites de Passage. In his essay Van Gennep discussed the three part process of sociatal rituals: separation, liminal period, and reassimilation. Graduating from high school marks the separation period from the status of the graduate as a high schooler as the graduate is removed from what they previously identified with, when the student begins higher education they enter reassimilation where they are placed into a new identity and learn a new set of societal rules, but the in-between period, where the student is neither a high schooler or college student, is what van Gennep would call the liminal period. The concept was further developed by anthropologist Victor Tuner in the 1960's where he described liminality as the ambiguity of an individual's place in the duration of societal ritual.[8][9]

Liminal spaces in culture have long existed in cultural and online spaces where they can offer a space without societal norms and marginalization[10]. However, they were brought into the mainsteam following the posting of a short creepypasta called "The Backrooms" on 4chan went viral.[11] The story was illustrated with an image exemplifying a liminal space—a hallway with yellow carpets and wallpaper—with a caption purporting that by "noclipping out of bounds in real life", one may enter The Backrooms, an empty wasteland of corridors with nothing but "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in".[12] The Backrooms have also been portrayed as inhabited by supernatural entities.[13]

Liminal space images soon gained popularity across the Internet, and by November 2022, a subreddit called r/LiminalSpace had over 500,000 members, the liminal space photo-posting @SpaceLiminalBot on Twitter had accrued over 1.2 million followers, and the TikTok #liminalspaces hashtag had over two billion views.[6]

Following the expansion of the genre, other forms of media have also drawn on liminal imagery. A found footage short film series set in The Backrooms accrued over sixty million views on its first episode, and several film and video game projects have been released or announced advertising their use of the aesthetic. A feature film set in The Backrooms from A24 is in development,[14] while another film based on the 2023 video game The Exit 8 is due from Toho and Japanese director Genki Kawamura.[15]

The 2013 videogame The Stanley Parable has also been retroactively noted to utilize liminal imagery, particularly the recurring visual motif of "mono-yellow" also present in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.[16] David Lynch's Twin Peaks, the 2022 horror film Skinamarink and the Apple TV+ series Severance also draw from liminal imagery, with the creator of the latter, Dan Erickson, specifically citing The Backrooms as a visual influence.[17][18]

See also

References

Further reading

External links

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