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.
Also, for places metro stations/gyms it's more of a maintenance and hygiene thing rather than an aesthetic. I'm currently in Paris so I've seen a ton of metro stations recently and really, unless you arrived in the dead of night so that you could snap an empty photo like the one in the article, there's nothing much liminal about them. A space can't be liminal if it's packed with people, buskers, beggars, dogs, etc. In that case, what it is is minimal or functional.
Indeed, I've been in airports where I had to go down a long and eerily empty hallway, and I assumed it was just a design work-around due to needing to get a tiny number of people from A to B without breaking the security and safety perimeter. Without that security need, e.g., in a regular city, that hallway would be replaced with walking a block or two outdoors.
> I'm currently in Paris so I've seen a ton of metro stations recently and really, unless you arrived in the dead of night so that you could snap an empty photo like the one in the article, there's nothing much liminal about them.
Liminal does not mean minimal. It means in-between, neither here nor there but in the interstices, transitional.
Dictionary.app in macOS Sequoia defines (with example usage) "liminal" as
> 1 occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold: I was in the liminal space between past and present | the paintings in this exhibition are the result of recent investigation into liminal states.
> 2 relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process: that liminal period when a child is old enough to begin following basic rules but is still too young to do so consistently.
By definition, metro stations are liminal spaces, as are airports, airlocks, highways, and most every transit station.
"Language as she is spoke" is very often at odds with literal dictionary definitions. So you're right that a liminal space is a transitional space, and that a metro is by definition that. But linimal aesthetic is different, especially as has recently become popular. It means a space that gives you that feeling of being between, of emptiness, introspection. A metro station absolutely does not have this aesthetic, except maybe at some mysterious hour where there's no one using it (and I've used them at both closing and opening times, they're never empty).
> But linimal aesthetic is different, especially as has recently become popular.
Your articulation of a liminal aesthetic hits upon the tension inherit in the word “liminal”.
By definition “liminal” signals “in between” which connotes an unsettledness or indeterminacy, or what in other realms is called the uncanny. This liminal aesthetic, at its core, is shot through with a sense of the uncanny, and empty devoid spaces where normally there is a lot of traffic convey this aesthetic clearly and succinctly.
Thank you for drawing this distinction.
My intent when referring to the denotation of “liminal” was to remind that even familiar places, such as bustling train stations and busy airport terminals, are also liminal spaces even if they don’t conform to current representations of the liminal _aesthetic_. By preserving the denotation of the word “liminal”, we can defamiliarize such spaces and recover (or emphasize) their liminality.
All of which is the message of art like Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”. Who doesn’t appreciate the defamiliarization of our “mundane” traversals of the realms we inhabit?
Good luck preserving the meaning of words. Words have no meaning outside how people use them to express ideas. Words can and do change to mean different things, or even 'literally' the opposite of themselves.
The very usage you bring up is a whimsical metaphorical one: "I was in the liminal space between past and present". We are all in this liminal space because we are all trapped between the past and the present.
Like many things throughout history, I strongly suspect it means whatever the author means.
But the abandonment of a place which should be filled with life is a huge aspect of the liminal art movement. It speaks to the hollowing out of public life in north america and britain.
Is the abandonment of places that should be filled with life a defining aspect of today? Which places? Malls & COVID? I guess they exist but are they especially prevalent today?
Unless all those people are transfixed into their own isolated, smartphone-mediated experience, as they are likely to be these days, then it's arguably "liminal" again. I.e. a lonely, deserted and uncanny place.
A Nina Simone song comes to mind: everyone's gone... to the moon...
The same art world (or more specifically the "Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute") also named "Frutiger Aero" the defining aesthetic of 2000s, even though it was really only seen in a few places (Aqua aesthetic is very different from Aero). All of this should probably be taken with grains of salt.
Is CARI part of the ”art world”? Where have CARI said that Frutiger Aero was ”the defining” aesthetic of 2000s? They are working to identify many different aesthetic trends that existed in parallel, not one that defines each decade.
Their description of Frutiger Aero explicitly includes Aqua, both mentioned by name and included visually:
In fact, when you see someone in the art world claiming that X is a "defining" anything, it usually means that they have a big collection of X for sale.
In this case, I imagine it's submarine marketing for the movie that's out.
I never got why Frutiger Aero got so popular as a ‘nostalgic’ aesthetic, when it’s basically the Windows Vista, GNOME 3 (the awful rewrite of GNOME 2), KDE 4.0 (the buggy, emo black rewrite of KDE 3) look?
It was the lowest point of computer graphics. Who the hell is nostalgic for that? Probably just kids that had their formative years in those ~2-3 years. Not sure you can even call it a niche.
I’m a fan on the vaporwave/Windows 2000/XP aesthetic, the Vista era is when everything started going to shit.
Its fascinating to me. I grew up in the UK home computer scene of the mid 80s-early 90s. After this, the Frutiger Aero aesthetic seemed to me redolent of the total corporatization of what previously seemed a much more human and approachable computer world. Now everything was behind glass, impossibly polished by unfathomable, expensive machines. I found it totally alienating.
Same, I hated when everything transitioned to it and became harder to read as a result. Frutiger Aero was a sterile sort of cheerful in a way only a CEO could think was relatable. It basically marked the turning point where the UI stopped being something janky that felt human made, into a mass produced corporate template.
Looking at it felt like the visual equivalent of licking soap.
Every time I see it now, I can only think “good riddance”.
I thought similarly, but the article actually was published prior to Backrooms movie release and popularity, though there is a nod they were aware the concept was being optioned to A24. Though I agree, “defining” might be a bit strong.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm slightly projecting my European sensitivities here, but I think there is more going on there than just the emptiness. There is a common theme that the spaces depicted are, on their own, quite unpleasant (barren, made from flimsy materials, probably emitting some amount of toxic fumes); it's just that this unpleasantness is normally masked by their human use and interpretation, which invariably some form of commercialism and hype. (Hence the abundance of hastily erected American mall architecture.)
A historical European town devoid of people does not work as a liminal space picture at all, because it still looks nice; and neither do the postapocalyptic settings that Japan is so fond of (YKK etc.). Eastern European commieblock and UK Brutalist hellscapes are actually quite similar in terms of the feeling they evoke, and have their own fandoms, but are considered their own genre - so I would conclude that "liminal space porn" is spaces only made tolerable by commercialism with the commercialism taken away, and the related "/r/UrbanHell" material is spaces only made tolerable by human habitation with that taken away or suppressed (e.g. if the humans are so bereft of vitality that they can no longer overcome the space's badness).
This is more or less my thoughts as well. Walking around the exterior of Nymphenburg Palace even when empty would not be very emotional at all.
Walking around a modern suburban development devoid of people, houses, pets, etc. would be at least unusual in the feeling. The spaces are intentionally designed to put people and their things within obvious boundaries. With the boundaries still there but lacking the things within them it becomes quite a different experience.
There are layers to that suburban setting and I wonder which ones you imagine.
There actually used to be this "empty suburb" feeling at many times per day when a typical bedroom community had sent its kids to school and parent to work. Particularly when they were not wealthy enough to have paid laborers around doing things during their work day. If anything, they got busier since COVID as people have more varied schedules.
Then there is the new but incomplete development, e.g. with graded lots and some subset of streets and walkways. If work is suspended for some reason, it may be decorated with idled earth movers, piles of building materials, or partial foundations or framing.
Or it might turn into the next type, which is an aborted subdivision build or after a severe wildfire, which is basically a moonscape of graded lots with no buildings nor vegetation.
Then there are the abandoned neighborhoods that were once vibrant. Old, decrepit buildings, and wild vegetation, e.g. around dead industrial towns.
I think classic liminal esthetic would also include empty swimming pools, resorts etc. It doesn't need to be barren or cheap, could be relatively luxurious, but needs to be late Modernist as a base - i.e. mass produced and devoid of conscious symbolism or ornamentation.
Its the combination of capitalism and lowest bidder architecture that is alienating to humans. And if humans are present, makes the space tolerable.
Remove the humans, and the space is off-putting, eerie and has a sense of dread.
And yeah, brutalism (usage of concrete as primary architecture) is also seen in the USA. And frankly, most of the buildings feel like prisons, and not where you want to go. Look no further than Indiana Univerity Hermann Wells library. https://maps.app.goo.gl/6FDvKR9sHSk3z8v56
Brutalist buildings feel directly hostile to humans, and not a vague sense of dread.
However I had the pleasure of seeing a brutalist hotel in Iceland (Fosshotel Vatnajokull) which combines concrete with wood. It felt sturdy and powerful, but also soft and welcoming. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wnXEawh2wptmQ3Rd7
But yeah, I do think youre on the right track. It really is related to capitalism and making horrible spaces (malls, etc). And without people, they are alienating and mild dread-inducing.
It's unfashionable but I still love brutalist architecture. It feels stable, like it would still be there whether it had people in it or not. Like living in a cave.
I'd agree that's it a component, but not a necessary one?
One of the strongest senses of liminality I've experienced has been being in a middle school at 9 PM when almost nobody else was in the building. I was a poll worker and we were wrapping up for the evening, so there were only 4 of us there. Doing things like walking to the bathroom through the empty school felt very strange, because I was surrounded by evidence of people using this space and yet there were none there.
A different place I felt that way was when I lived in Flint, MI. I'd walk to work early in the morning, and I'd pass the Flint Institute of Arts, which was at the time one of the few places in the city with any money, so they had a very well maintained and manicured outdoor space (evidence of people), but I never saw anyone.
On the other hand, airports and hotels are classic liminal and they're usually peopled.
> 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've heard that about Dali, couple of decades ago, and had forgotten. I used to get complete songs in my head; if i was near my workstation i'd transcribe it as best i could. Usually, though, i was in the car. Lost probably hundreds of songs due to not being at home and not carrying a recording device. I fixed the recording device part in mid-2000s; prior to that i had some real crap for live audio recording.
As an example of both "full song in head" and "crap recording equipment" i present a 25 year old track and also ringtone of mine(1 "F" bomb in the track): https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/showerbassline
if you scroll all the way down my track list, there's a track called "greenocide" which is written similarly, inspiration, transcription, then field audio recordings and telephone tap recordings, but much higher quality overall!
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.
I can definitely see how the vast spaces "inside" of an AI model (more precisely, the space of every possible output for every possible input) are similar to the backrooms in that they are huge, related to human activity yet impossible for any human to fully comprehend, sort of "haunted" by humanity yet devoid of it, dreamlike, and so on.
The connection between AI and dreams is interesting in its own right. I am reminded of Google's DeepDream specifically, with its bizarre images that yet seem strongly reminiscent of how humans actually perceive things on some level.
I feel that generative AI is the culmination of Baudrillard and Mark Fisher's thesis.
The world we live in is already dead, and we are wandering with its ghosts. After capitalism strips everything off its materiality and leaves only with its symbols, only the nostalgia for a non-existent past remains.
> Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon [...] physical space
I'd like to put extra emphasis on this "swallows": It's not just that a location is generating eerie mimics, like the output hopper of an eldritch factory. The space uses mimicry to attract, surround, and swallow people. We are like insects who cannot quite comprehend the pitcher-plant. The terror and dread comes from an unhappy-medium of partial understanding.
Through that lens, we can see a lot of rather low-hanging-fruit for further comparisons to "late-stage capitalism" or other obtuse and soulless systems we can't avoid.
> It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled
I've occasionally opined that claiming we've invented thinking-machines is hubris, but we may have made dreaming-machines.
I see parallels between prompt injection causing an LLM to jump the rails and start telling an entirely different story, and how dreams [0] often have discontinuities that only seem odd in hindsight.
______
[0] Or at any rate, our after-the-fact memories of a dream, which may themselves be unreliable or fabricated rather than a true record of a past experience.
I think this hits on a genre which hasn't quite happened yet: deguard-railed, presumably pirate model LLM outputs.
Like the early days of ChatGPT when you could fairly easily jailbreak it to ease GPT4 output, I think we're likely to see a whole community of getting whichever of these models leaks to explore the weirder areas of their weights as a kind of internet performance art thing.
I suspect your system being suitably grey market or possibly stolen would be a pre-requisite of such a scene.
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).
I randomly drove by there back in about 2018 or so when I happened to be in Pittsburgh for a weekend. The parking lot was empty, so it must have closed by that time, but it was still intact.
Very intense memories of going there with my grandparents as a little kid, riding the holiday train, seeing Santa, etc. Even met the handyman from Mr Rogers Neighborhood one time!
I blame it on the art world being full of pseudo-intellectual little shits, so of course they get off on the Marxian esthetic of throwing around signalling phrases like "late capitalism". They live and die by pretense, there just isn't anything more than that to these "people". All facade, nothing inside. The average LLM has more soul than these types, I fear.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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'.
> Liminalism (if we can christen this as a movement, and we should) is a form dedicated to the discovery of digital found art. It is important not just because of its content, but because it signals the migration of critical terminology and thinking into popular discourse in a truly democratic sense, independent of the traditional confines of the art industry as expressed in exhibitions, galleries, and museums.
This is not the language of an elitist.
If anything, it sounds like someone defending Liminalism's inclusion in the contemporary canon from arrogant elitists.
It’s just one group of elitists slap-fighting another.
Are we really supposed to take seriously that “liminalism is the defining aesthetic of our time”?
> This is not the language of an elitist.
It absolutely is. Someone claiming to tell you what is “important”, what is “truly democratic”, in contradiction to “traditional” structures is elitism at its most insufferable.
It is definitely that. But the art critics also use very loaded terms and such to also confuse any discussion. That language is also used to identify the 'in' crowd too.
Examples:
"Emptied of stores and absent of humans, Columbus’s photograph captures the melancholic discomfort of liminal aesthetics — the strange, simultaneous pull of disquiet and nostalgia that makes this bottom-up, crowd-curated digital movement among the most pertinent and explicit artistic reactions to the strange, surreal experience of living in our particular moment of dystopian late capitalism."
Holy run-on dense sentence, Batman! The amount of connected jargon (and overloading the jargon) is said in such a way that you cant engage with it. That should have been 3 sentences.
"As an internet phenomenon, the most recent iteration of liminal aesthetics can be primarily traced to a 2019 Creepypasta collaborative short story entitled “The Backrooms,” which first appeared on the message board 4chan."
As much as 4chan spouts (slur for black people, slur for gay people, pro-nazi propaganda), that thread is super approachable by everyone. 'Post your disquieting images that feel off'.
"Obviously, the clearest thematic precursor to Liminalism is Edward Hopper. There is a stolid, individualistic, bootstrapping Protestant work ethic element to Hopper’s work, which is, in its sheer insanity, the wellspring of the alienation implicit in Liminalism."
First, the definition is researching that artist, and trying to even understand their place and all the hidden meanings there. But the point is name dropping, showing the "in group" that they really totally know what theyre talking about.
The reality is that art really is for everyone! Humans have been making art since before we were homo sapiens. The problem is the arrogant art critique world is trying to gatekeep "art" to their own definitions and nomenclature that excludes the masses.
"high art" and the language of high art is ripe for satire. That I totally get.
But, I would actually beg, to not let those who indulge in high art language colonise "art" as well. Art is for you and me, everyone. twats writing bollocks is for the "elite"
Art history is a mixed bag, it is also for all of us, even if it tedious.
I agree, and as the article makes clear, this current liminalism really does not come from the world of "High Art":
>As an internet phenomenon, the most recent iteration of liminal aesthetics can be primarily traced to a 2019 Creepypasta collaborative short story entitled "The Backrooms"
This is ground-up, the opposite of high art. It's even kind of "outsider art".
Ive also purchased and commissioned a few pieces of art. And I find that with actual artists, they ARE very approachable and dont have the Art Critic vibe of 'better than you'.
Its primarily the art literature and critics whom portray this haughty and 'holier than thou' types of one way conversations.
My SO works for a art museum, and they constantly fight with those types as well. When their museum hosts art painting days for artists (primarily plen air or open air painting), the artists use appropriate jargon for painting, but the critics show up and its basically a word-soup for their own vernacular.
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.
Also, for places metro stations/gyms it's more of a maintenance and hygiene thing rather than an aesthetic. I'm currently in Paris so I've seen a ton of metro stations recently and really, unless you arrived in the dead of night so that you could snap an empty photo like the one in the article, there's nothing much liminal about them. A space can't be liminal if it's packed with people, buskers, beggars, dogs, etc. In that case, what it is is minimal or functional.
Indeed, I've been in airports where I had to go down a long and eerily empty hallway, and I assumed it was just a design work-around due to needing to get a tiny number of people from A to B without breaking the security and safety perimeter. Without that security need, e.g., in a regular city, that hallway would be replaced with walking a block or two outdoors.
> I'm currently in Paris so I've seen a ton of metro stations recently and really, unless you arrived in the dead of night so that you could snap an empty photo like the one in the article, there's nothing much liminal about them.
Liminal does not mean minimal. It means in-between, neither here nor there but in the interstices, transitional.
Dictionary.app in macOS Sequoia defines (with example usage) "liminal" as
By definition, metro stations are liminal spaces, as are airports, airlocks, highways, and most every transit station."Language as she is spoke" is very often at odds with literal dictionary definitions. So you're right that a liminal space is a transitional space, and that a metro is by definition that. But linimal aesthetic is different, especially as has recently become popular. It means a space that gives you that feeling of being between, of emptiness, introspection. A metro station absolutely does not have this aesthetic, except maybe at some mysterious hour where there's no one using it (and I've used them at both closing and opening times, they're never empty).
> But linimal aesthetic is different, especially as has recently become popular.
Your articulation of a liminal aesthetic hits upon the tension inherit in the word “liminal”.
By definition “liminal” signals “in between” which connotes an unsettledness or indeterminacy, or what in other realms is called the uncanny. This liminal aesthetic, at its core, is shot through with a sense of the uncanny, and empty devoid spaces where normally there is a lot of traffic convey this aesthetic clearly and succinctly.
Thank you for drawing this distinction.
My intent when referring to the denotation of “liminal” was to remind that even familiar places, such as bustling train stations and busy airport terminals, are also liminal spaces even if they don’t conform to current representations of the liminal _aesthetic_. By preserving the denotation of the word “liminal”, we can defamiliarize such spaces and recover (or emphasize) their liminality.
All of which is the message of art like Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports”. Who doesn’t appreciate the defamiliarization of our “mundane” traversals of the realms we inhabit?
Good luck preserving the meaning of words. Words have no meaning outside how people use them to express ideas. Words can and do change to mean different things, or even 'literally' the opposite of themselves.
The very usage you bring up is a whimsical metaphorical one: "I was in the liminal space between past and present". We are all in this liminal space because we are all trapped between the past and the present.
Like many things throughout history, I strongly suspect it means whatever the author means.
But the abandonment of a place which should be filled with life is a huge aspect of the liminal art movement. It speaks to the hollowing out of public life in north america and britain.
Is the abandonment of places that should be filled with life a defining aspect of today? Which places? Malls & COVID? I guess they exist but are they especially prevalent today?
Yes, a lot of public spaces are dying or dead. If you don't have these spaces in your area you are certainly the only exception.
Unless all those people are transfixed into their own isolated, smartphone-mediated experience, as they are likely to be these days, then it's arguably "liminal" again. I.e. a lonely, deserted and uncanny place.
A Nina Simone song comes to mind: everyone's gone... to the moon...
I'm on a metro right now, it's full of conversation and there was even an accordion player in my previous train.
The same art world (or more specifically the "Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute") also named "Frutiger Aero" the defining aesthetic of 2000s, even though it was really only seen in a few places (Aqua aesthetic is very different from Aero). All of this should probably be taken with grains of salt.
Is CARI part of the ”art world”? Where have CARI said that Frutiger Aero was ”the defining” aesthetic of 2000s? They are working to identify many different aesthetic trends that existed in parallel, not one that defines each decade.
Their description of Frutiger Aero explicitly includes Aqua, both mentioned by name and included visually:
https://www.are.na/consumer-aesthetics-research-institute/fr...
There is no “official opinion” of the art world. These are just different organizations with their own opinions.
In fact, when you see someone in the art world claiming that X is a "defining" anything, it usually means that they have a big collection of X for sale.
In this case, I imagine it's submarine marketing for the movie that's out.
Submarine? Astro-turf or native-advertising, maybe? Or perhaps I misunderstood.
Basically the same. An “article” planted by a PR firm, where the promotional target just happens to pop up about halfway through.
I'm not sure this magazine is nearly popular enough for that to be worth it.
I never got why Frutiger Aero got so popular as a ‘nostalgic’ aesthetic, when it’s basically the Windows Vista, GNOME 3 (the awful rewrite of GNOME 2), KDE 4.0 (the buggy, emo black rewrite of KDE 3) look?
It was the lowest point of computer graphics. Who the hell is nostalgic for that? Probably just kids that had their formative years in those ~2-3 years. Not sure you can even call it a niche.
I’m a fan on the vaporwave/Windows 2000/XP aesthetic, the Vista era is when everything started going to shit.
Its fascinating to me. I grew up in the UK home computer scene of the mid 80s-early 90s. After this, the Frutiger Aero aesthetic seemed to me redolent of the total corporatization of what previously seemed a much more human and approachable computer world. Now everything was behind glass, impossibly polished by unfathomable, expensive machines. I found it totally alienating.
Same, I hated when everything transitioned to it and became harder to read as a result. Frutiger Aero was a sterile sort of cheerful in a way only a CEO could think was relatable. It basically marked the turning point where the UI stopped being something janky that felt human made, into a mass produced corporate template.
Looking at it felt like the visual equivalent of licking soap.
Every time I see it now, I can only think “good riddance”.
Well yes, nostalgia is based on age. The people who are nostalgic for that grew up with those sorts of UI.
Yeah, even nostalgia is no longer what it used to be...
Welcome to old age :-).
I thought similarly, but the article actually was published prior to Backrooms movie release and popularity, though there is a nod they were aware the concept was being optioned to A24. Though I agree, “defining” might be a bit strong.
Anti-space, no space, nothingness - annihilation.
bland-ness, anti-self-expression, fear of being 'called-out'
Liminialism is way way more popular these days than cyberpunk or anything like that. Please go talk to a group of teenagers if you don't believe me.
All of the ones you list have one thing in common: They have at least some root in nostalgia.
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.
[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
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.
Maybe I'm slightly projecting my European sensitivities here, but I think there is more going on there than just the emptiness. There is a common theme that the spaces depicted are, on their own, quite unpleasant (barren, made from flimsy materials, probably emitting some amount of toxic fumes); it's just that this unpleasantness is normally masked by their human use and interpretation, which invariably some form of commercialism and hype. (Hence the abundance of hastily erected American mall architecture.)
A historical European town devoid of people does not work as a liminal space picture at all, because it still looks nice; and neither do the postapocalyptic settings that Japan is so fond of (YKK etc.). Eastern European commieblock and UK Brutalist hellscapes are actually quite similar in terms of the feeling they evoke, and have their own fandoms, but are considered their own genre - so I would conclude that "liminal space porn" is spaces only made tolerable by commercialism with the commercialism taken away, and the related "/r/UrbanHell" material is spaces only made tolerable by human habitation with that taken away or suppressed (e.g. if the humans are so bereft of vitality that they can no longer overcome the space's badness).
This is more or less my thoughts as well. Walking around the exterior of Nymphenburg Palace even when empty would not be very emotional at all.
Walking around a modern suburban development devoid of people, houses, pets, etc. would be at least unusual in the feeling. The spaces are intentionally designed to put people and their things within obvious boundaries. With the boundaries still there but lacking the things within them it becomes quite a different experience.
There are layers to that suburban setting and I wonder which ones you imagine.
There actually used to be this "empty suburb" feeling at many times per day when a typical bedroom community had sent its kids to school and parent to work. Particularly when they were not wealthy enough to have paid laborers around doing things during their work day. If anything, they got busier since COVID as people have more varied schedules.
Then there is the new but incomplete development, e.g. with graded lots and some subset of streets and walkways. If work is suspended for some reason, it may be decorated with idled earth movers, piles of building materials, or partial foundations or framing.
Or it might turn into the next type, which is an aborted subdivision build or after a severe wildfire, which is basically a moonscape of graded lots with no buildings nor vegetation.
Then there are the abandoned neighborhoods that were once vibrant. Old, decrepit buildings, and wild vegetation, e.g. around dead industrial towns.
I think classic liminal esthetic would also include empty swimming pools, resorts etc. It doesn't need to be barren or cheap, could be relatively luxurious, but needs to be late Modernist as a base - i.e. mass produced and devoid of conscious symbolism or ornamentation.
I get and agree with what youre saying.
Its the combination of capitalism and lowest bidder architecture that is alienating to humans. And if humans are present, makes the space tolerable.
Remove the humans, and the space is off-putting, eerie and has a sense of dread.
And yeah, brutalism (usage of concrete as primary architecture) is also seen in the USA. And frankly, most of the buildings feel like prisons, and not where you want to go. Look no further than Indiana Univerity Hermann Wells library. https://maps.app.goo.gl/6FDvKR9sHSk3z8v56
Brutalist buildings feel directly hostile to humans, and not a vague sense of dread.
However I had the pleasure of seeing a brutalist hotel in Iceland (Fosshotel Vatnajokull) which combines concrete with wood. It felt sturdy and powerful, but also soft and welcoming. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wnXEawh2wptmQ3Rd7
But yeah, I do think youre on the right track. It really is related to capitalism and making horrible spaces (malls, etc). And without people, they are alienating and mild dread-inducing.
It's unfashionable but I still love brutalist architecture. It feels stable, like it would still be there whether it had people in it or not. Like living in a cave.
I'd agree that's it a component, but not a necessary one?
One of the strongest senses of liminality I've experienced has been being in a middle school at 9 PM when almost nobody else was in the building. I was a poll worker and we were wrapping up for the evening, so there were only 4 of us there. Doing things like walking to the bathroom through the empty school felt very strange, because I was surrounded by evidence of people using this space and yet there were none there.
A different place I felt that way was when I lived in Flint, MI. I'd walk to work early in the morning, and I'd pass the Flint Institute of Arts, which was at the time one of the few places in the city with any money, so they had a very well maintained and manicured outdoor space (evidence of people), but I never saw anyone.
On the other hand, airports and hotels are classic liminal and they're usually peopled.
> 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've heard that about Dali, couple of decades ago, and had forgotten. I used to get complete songs in my head; if i was near my workstation i'd transcribe it as best i could. Usually, though, i was in the car. Lost probably hundreds of songs due to not being at home and not carrying a recording device. I fixed the recording device part in mid-2000s; prior to that i had some real crap for live audio recording.
As an example of both "full song in head" and "crap recording equipment" i present a 25 year old track and also ringtone of mine(1 "F" bomb in the track): https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/showerbassline
https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/showerringtone
if you scroll all the way down my track list, there's a track called "greenocide" which is written similarly, inspiration, transcription, then field audio recordings and telephone tap recordings, but much higher quality overall!
You mean hypnagogia?
Liminal dreaming. Ain’t never heard that before, sounds like pseudoscience woo-woo to me.
The proper term is hypnagogia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
Not voovoo. Tested, works. Used by Lynch and Dali to inspire dreamlike works. Used by Edison to aid solving complex problems https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-na...
Studies showed better math solving after hypnogagia state: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8654287/ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj5866
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.
I can definitely see how the vast spaces "inside" of an AI model (more precisely, the space of every possible output for every possible input) are similar to the backrooms in that they are huge, related to human activity yet impossible for any human to fully comprehend, sort of "haunted" by humanity yet devoid of it, dreamlike, and so on.
The connection between AI and dreams is interesting in its own right. I am reminded of Google's DeepDream specifically, with its bizarre images that yet seem strongly reminiscent of how humans actually perceive things on some level.
I feel that generative AI is the culmination of Baudrillard and Mark Fisher's thesis.
The world we live in is already dead, and we are wandering with its ghosts. After capitalism strips everything off its materiality and leaves only with its symbols, only the nostalgia for a non-existent past remains.
That was good art criticism and insight into the cultural context of the liminal aesthetic.
This should be an essay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
+
> Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon [...] physical space
I'd like to put extra emphasis on this "swallows": It's not just that a location is generating eerie mimics, like the output hopper of an eldritch factory. The space uses mimicry to attract, surround, and swallow people. We are like insects who cannot quite comprehend the pitcher-plant. The terror and dread comes from an unhappy-medium of partial understanding.
Through that lens, we can see a lot of rather low-hanging-fruit for further comparisons to "late-stage capitalism" or other obtuse and soulless systems we can't avoid.
> It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled
I've occasionally opined that claiming we've invented thinking-machines is hubris, but we may have made dreaming-machines.
I see parallels between prompt injection causing an LLM to jump the rails and start telling an entirely different story, and how dreams [0] often have discontinuities that only seem odd in hindsight.
______
[0] Or at any rate, our after-the-fact memories of a dream, which may themselves be unreliable or fabricated rather than a true record of a past experience.
I think this hits on a genre which hasn't quite happened yet: deguard-railed, presumably pirate model LLM outputs.
Like the early days of ChatGPT when you could fairly easily jailbreak it to ease GPT4 output, I think we're likely to see a whole community of getting whichever of these models leaks to explore the weirder areas of their weights as a kind of internet performance art thing.
I suspect your system being suitably grey market or possibly stolen would be a pre-requisite of such a scene.
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).
Same here! I haven’t been by the area for years but I guess it’s in a state of demolition currently.
I randomly drove by there back in about 2018 or so when I happened to be in Pittsburgh for a weekend. The parking lot was empty, so it must have closed by that time, but it was still intact.
Very intense memories of going there with my grandparents as a little kid, riding the holiday train, seeing Santa, etc. Even met the handyman from Mr Rogers Neighborhood one time!
Ah, the 80s.
Interesting article, but calling it THE defining aesthetic of our time feels a bit sensational.
"our particular slice of dystopian late capitalism."
Did not call it the aesthetic of our time since the term was first used for post world war I economies.
We must be in late-to-its-own-funeral capitalism.
A ton of liminal space photos are of Soviet era stuff, especially brutalist architecture.
I blame it on the art world being full of pseudo-intellectual little shits, so of course they get off on the Marxian esthetic of throwing around signalling phrases like "late capitalism". They live and die by pretense, there just isn't anything more than that to these "people". All facade, nothing inside. The average LLM has more soul than these types, I fear.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@EverythingEmptyAlwaysAlone/videos
Liminalism? Nah thanks sorry I'm into littoralism these days, give me coastlines and beaches.
Some get too salty about it, and their heads need riparian.
A few years ago I spent awhile researching liminality for a blog post:
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology
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.
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)
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.
It’s some memes. No one is intentionally designing architecture with bare beige walls and flickering tube lights.
Also, most of the images in the article don’t actually invoke the liminal spaces feeling.
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.
“How a popular movie confirms my priors”
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
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NuSbELCNloc
A lot of the images in the article aren't actually that liminal.
This stuff is maybe more liminal: https://x.com/PenguinWeb3/status/2063196355011424582?s=20
Those are interesting, but not liminal.
Except for the fact that modern design aesthetic has eliminated spaces with an uncontrolled and ambient vibe. Which makes this article bs.
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'.
> Liminalism (if we can christen this as a movement, and we should) is a form dedicated to the discovery of digital found art. It is important not just because of its content, but because it signals the migration of critical terminology and thinking into popular discourse in a truly democratic sense, independent of the traditional confines of the art industry as expressed in exhibitions, galleries, and museums.
This is not the language of an elitist.
If anything, it sounds like someone defending Liminalism's inclusion in the contemporary canon from arrogant elitists.
It’s just one group of elitists slap-fighting another.
Are we really supposed to take seriously that “liminalism is the defining aesthetic of our time”?
> This is not the language of an elitist.
It absolutely is. Someone claiming to tell you what is “important”, what is “truly democratic”, in contradiction to “traditional” structures is elitism at its most insufferable.
It is definitely that. But the art critics also use very loaded terms and such to also confuse any discussion. That language is also used to identify the 'in' crowd too.
Examples:
"Emptied of stores and absent of humans, Columbus’s photograph captures the melancholic discomfort of liminal aesthetics — the strange, simultaneous pull of disquiet and nostalgia that makes this bottom-up, crowd-curated digital movement among the most pertinent and explicit artistic reactions to the strange, surreal experience of living in our particular moment of dystopian late capitalism."
Holy run-on dense sentence, Batman! The amount of connected jargon (and overloading the jargon) is said in such a way that you cant engage with it. That should have been 3 sentences.
"As an internet phenomenon, the most recent iteration of liminal aesthetics can be primarily traced to a 2019 Creepypasta collaborative short story entitled “The Backrooms,” which first appeared on the message board 4chan."
And heres a backup of the original 4chan post https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/22661164/#22661164
As much as 4chan spouts (slur for black people, slur for gay people, pro-nazi propaganda), that thread is super approachable by everyone. 'Post your disquieting images that feel off'.
"Obviously, the clearest thematic precursor to Liminalism is Edward Hopper. There is a stolid, individualistic, bootstrapping Protestant work ethic element to Hopper’s work, which is, in its sheer insanity, the wellspring of the alienation implicit in Liminalism."
First, the definition is researching that artist, and trying to even understand their place and all the hidden meanings there. But the point is name dropping, showing the "in group" that they really totally know what theyre talking about.
The reality is that art really is for everyone! Humans have been making art since before we were homo sapiens. The problem is the arrogant art critique world is trying to gatekeep "art" to their own definitions and nomenclature that excludes the masses.
"high art" and the language of high art is ripe for satire. That I totally get.
But, I would actually beg, to not let those who indulge in high art language colonise "art" as well. Art is for you and me, everyone. twats writing bollocks is for the "elite"
Art history is a mixed bag, it is also for all of us, even if it tedious.
I agree, and as the article makes clear, this current liminalism really does not come from the world of "High Art":
>As an internet phenomenon, the most recent iteration of liminal aesthetics can be primarily traced to a 2019 Creepypasta collaborative short story entitled "The Backrooms"
This is ground-up, the opposite of high art. It's even kind of "outsider art".
What are some terms that would have benefitted from elucidations? Also can you give an example were the tone felt arrogant?
Where in this article do you feel that people are being looked down on?
This sounds like the chip on your shoulder rather than anything about the article.
Not at all.
Ive also purchased and commissioned a few pieces of art. And I find that with actual artists, they ARE very approachable and dont have the Art Critic vibe of 'better than you'.
Its primarily the art literature and critics whom portray this haughty and 'holier than thou' types of one way conversations.
My SO works for a art museum, and they constantly fight with those types as well. When their museum hosts art painting days for artists (primarily plen air or open air painting), the artists use appropriate jargon for painting, but the critics show up and its basically a word-soup for their own vernacular.
Cocaine, crazy egos, and unchallenged mental illness will do that.