Lecture
In internet aesthetics, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, deserted, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are usually places of transition, related to the concept of liminality.
Research from the "Journal of Environmental Psychology" has shown that liminal spaces can seem creepy or strange because they fall into the uncanny valley of architecture and physical places. An article from the journal "Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture" attributes this eeriness to familiar places stripped of their usual context.
The aesthetic gained popularity in 2019 after a 4chan post depicting a liminal space called the Backrooms went viral. Since then, images of liminal space have been posted all over the internet, including on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok.
An empty hotel corridor, an example of a liminal space
Broadly speaking, the term "liminal space" is used to describe a place or state of change or transition; this can be physical (such as a doorway) or psychological (such as the period of adolescence). Images of liminal space often display this sense of "in-between," capturing transitional places (such as stairwells, roads, corridors, or hotels) unsettlingly devoid of people. The aesthetic can convey a mood of eeriness, surrealism, nostalgia, or sadness, and evoke reactions of both comfort and unease.
This image of an empty playground can cause anxiety because it lacks the expected context (that is, the presence of children).
Research by Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis of Cardiff University attributes the unsettling nature of liminal spaces to the uncanny valley phenomenon. The term, which is usually applied to humanoids whose imperfect resemblance to humans triggers a sense of unease, may explain similar reactions to liminal imagery. In this case, physical places that seem familiar but slightly deviate from reality create the sense of eeriness typical of liminal spaces.
Peter Heft of Pulse: the Journal of Science and Culture further explores this feeling of eeriness. Drawing on the work of Mark Fisher, Heft explains that such eeriness can be felt when a person views a situation in a context different from the one they expect. For example, a school building, which is expected to be a lively gathering of teachers and students, becomes unsettling when depicted as unnaturally empty. Fisher considered this "failure of presence" to be one of the hallmarks of the aesthetic experience of eeriness.
A typical digitally rendered image of the Backrooms
Images depicting liminal spaces gained popularity in 2019, when a short creepypasta of unknown origin was posted on 4chan and went viral. The creepypasta showed an image illustrating a liminal space — a corridor with yellow carpets and wallpaper — with a caption implying that by "noclipping out of reality," one could end up in the Backrooms, an empty wasteland of corridors where there is nothing but "the stench of old damp 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." The Backrooms were also depicted as inhabited by supernatural entities.
Images of liminal space soon became popular across the internet, and by November 2022 a subreddit called r/LiminalSpace had over 500,000 members, the Twitter account @SpaceLiminalBot, which posts photos of liminal space, had gained more than 1.2 million followers, and the hashtag #liminalspaces on TikTok had racked up more than two billion views.
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