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Liminal Spaces
Jun. 2nd, 2021 04:19 pmWas getting into liminal spaces online, which is a weird thing to get into, I guess, but not so much that there aren't at least two popular subreddits dedicated to it, r/liminalspace and to a lesser extent r/backrooms (warning, the latter is spooky and more of an ARG type thing). To a lesser extent, try r/deadmalls for abandoned malls specifically, and if you're more into Twitter try the @SpaceLiminalBot.
There seems to be a lot of commonalities to these posts and it makes me wonder if it's primarily a symptom of modernity. In the US, Canada, and elsewhere, lots and lots of modern buildings went up very quickly in the last century, leading to lots of public and semi-public places that look almost identical. Seeing these places devoid of people is unsettling in itself, but at the same time, you may know this place because it's identical to your mall, or your school, or your local fast food restaurant, or office building, or church, or whatever because they all genuinely look the same, but not exactly. So the nagging feeling of familiarity is always there looking at these places because they really do, all in actuality, look the same. It makes me wonder if in places with significantly fewer modern buildings in this style, have these same feelings, because these places aren't familiar to them. Maybe if you live in Amsterdam there's enough distinctiveness in the architecture that you don't have these feelings, or they're much more difficult to trigger because abandoned places that look like Dutch streets are hard to find, unlike these modern American buildings that go up and come down as quick as corn stalks in a cornfield.
But then there are the places that really nobody goes to that feel familiar. There's a very specific type of liminal space like the type the instagram jaredpike.art makes. Looking at sources for a lot of these pictures, when they're not artistic renders a lot of them seem to be from places like water treatment facilities in German countries. It's a very specific look that's very familiar -- blue water, small white tiles, curving walls that seem to go nowhere... you can hear these places, smell them, feel them, it's very strange, and yet no one on these has ever been to one of these water facilities, or knows where they are, and certainly if you go to Austria you wouldn't be able to go into one of these cisterns and take a swim. Why do we know them? I don't know.
I think there is something about these places, I don't know, I feel a lack of obligations looking at them. I maybe don't have a past or present or future in them so I do not have to worry about obligations, the existence of a blank space also implies blank time to go along with it. And maybe that's why, despite being eerie, they're pleasant to look at.
I think these places also have a lot in common with dreamwidth and neocities static pages, in a way. They were maybe developed at the same time as these places, and are pretty empty. Dreamwidth doesn't have a lot of users and limited means of interactions, not forcing obligations on the user browsing, which makes it feel spatially "empty" like these empty malls. When you look at a personal static page like neocities, there's an emptiness because the creator of the space is not looking back at you, not scrutinizing you so intently as modern websites, not demanding your engagement with your own responses, posts, "likes", metrics, even cookies, for the most part. It's eerie in its emptiness but it's nice to just be alone... the tradeoff of being alone is that one is no longer being watched.
There seems to be a lot of commonalities to these posts and it makes me wonder if it's primarily a symptom of modernity. In the US, Canada, and elsewhere, lots and lots of modern buildings went up very quickly in the last century, leading to lots of public and semi-public places that look almost identical. Seeing these places devoid of people is unsettling in itself, but at the same time, you may know this place because it's identical to your mall, or your school, or your local fast food restaurant, or office building, or church, or whatever because they all genuinely look the same, but not exactly. So the nagging feeling of familiarity is always there looking at these places because they really do, all in actuality, look the same. It makes me wonder if in places with significantly fewer modern buildings in this style, have these same feelings, because these places aren't familiar to them. Maybe if you live in Amsterdam there's enough distinctiveness in the architecture that you don't have these feelings, or they're much more difficult to trigger because abandoned places that look like Dutch streets are hard to find, unlike these modern American buildings that go up and come down as quick as corn stalks in a cornfield.
But then there are the places that really nobody goes to that feel familiar. There's a very specific type of liminal space like the type the instagram jaredpike.art makes. Looking at sources for a lot of these pictures, when they're not artistic renders a lot of them seem to be from places like water treatment facilities in German countries. It's a very specific look that's very familiar -- blue water, small white tiles, curving walls that seem to go nowhere... you can hear these places, smell them, feel them, it's very strange, and yet no one on these has ever been to one of these water facilities, or knows where they are, and certainly if you go to Austria you wouldn't be able to go into one of these cisterns and take a swim. Why do we know them? I don't know.
I think there is something about these places, I don't know, I feel a lack of obligations looking at them. I maybe don't have a past or present or future in them so I do not have to worry about obligations, the existence of a blank space also implies blank time to go along with it. And maybe that's why, despite being eerie, they're pleasant to look at.
I think these places also have a lot in common with dreamwidth and neocities static pages, in a way. They were maybe developed at the same time as these places, and are pretty empty. Dreamwidth doesn't have a lot of users and limited means of interactions, not forcing obligations on the user browsing, which makes it feel spatially "empty" like these empty malls. When you look at a personal static page like neocities, there's an emptiness because the creator of the space is not looking back at you, not scrutinizing you so intently as modern websites, not demanding your engagement with your own responses, posts, "likes", metrics, even cookies, for the most part. It's eerie in its emptiness but it's nice to just be alone... the tradeoff of being alone is that one is no longer being watched.
