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.
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 conveys this aesthetic very well.
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?
Like many things throughout history, I strongly suspect it means whatever the author means.
A Nina Simone song comes to mind: everyone's gone... to the moon...
Their description of Frutiger Aero explicitly includes Aqua, both mentioned by name and included visually:
https://www.are.na/consumer-aesthetics-research-institute/fr...
In this case, I imagine it's submarine marketing for the movie that's out.
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.
Welcome to old age :-).
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The proper term is hypnagogia.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Also, most of the images in the article don’t actually invoke the liminal spaces feeling.
This stuff is maybe more liminal: https://x.com/PenguinWeb3/status/2063196355011424582?s=20
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.