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.
esperent 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Schlagbohrer 1 hours ago [-]
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.
krackers 8 hours ago [-]
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.
tobr 6 hours ago [-]
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:
There is no “official opinion” of the art world. These are just different organizations with their own opinions.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
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.
picofarad 2 minutes ago [-]
Submarine? Astro-turf or native-advertising, maybe? Or perhaps I misunderstood.
sph 7 hours ago [-]
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.
richardjdare 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
fhars 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, even nostalgia is no longer what it used to be...
Welcome to old age :-).
satvikpendem 6 hours ago [-]
Well yes, nostalgia is based on age. The people who are nostalgic for that grew up with those sorts of UI.
appplication 9 hours ago [-]
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.
acidhousemcnab 2 hours ago [-]
Anti-space, no space, nothingness - annihilation.
50 minutes ago [-]
whilenot-dev 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
NoboruWataya 4 hours ago [-]
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.
4bpp 3 hours ago [-]
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).
kaycebasques 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
satvikpendem 6 hours ago [-]
You mean hypnagogia?
nandomrumber 8 hours ago [-]
Liminal dreaming. Ain’t never heard that before, sounds like pseudoscience woo-woo to me.
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.
lioeters 31 minutes ago [-]
That was good art criticism and insight into the cultural context of the liminal aesthetic.
zwischenzug 6 hours ago [-]
This should be an essay.
barrenko 6 hours ago [-]
+
Terr_ 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
XorNot 1 hours ago [-]
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.
royal__ 9 hours ago [-]
Interesting article, but calling it THE defining aesthetic of our time feels a bit sensational.
readthenotes1 8 hours ago [-]
"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.
_0ffh 4 hours ago [-]
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.
floren 7 hours ago [-]
Liminalism? Nah thanks sorry I'm into littoralism these days, give me coastlines and beaches.
Terr_ 4 hours ago [-]
Some get too salty about it, and their heads need riparian.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
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).
keiferski 7 hours ago [-]
Same here! I haven’t been by the area for years but I guess it’s in a state of demolition currently.
timr 7 hours ago [-]
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.
keiferski 8 hours ago [-]
A few years ago I spent awhile researching liminality for a blog post:
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!
tobolek 6 hours ago [-]
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)
officialchicken 8 hours ago [-]
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.
metalman 3 hours ago [-]
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
Except for the fact that modern design aesthetic has eliminated spaces with an uncontrolled and ambient vibe. Which makes this article bs.
Npovview 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mystraline 9 hours ago [-]
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'.
KaiserPro 4 hours ago [-]
"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.
isomorphic 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
antonvs 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mystraline 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
krelian 8 hours ago [-]
What are some terms that would have benefitted from elucidations? Also can you give an example were the tone felt arrogant?
mcphage 57 minutes ago [-]
This sounds like the chip on your shoulder rather than anything about the article.
mystraline 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
p_j_w 8 hours ago [-]
Where in this article do you feel that people are being looked down on?
t0lo 7 hours ago [-]
Cocaine, crazy egos, and unchallenged mental illness will do that.
6 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 13:20:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves#Legacy
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepypasta
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).
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.
The proper term is hypnagogia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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
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.
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.
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.
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://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NuSbELCNloc
This stuff is maybe more liminal: https://x.com/PenguinWeb3/status/2063196355011424582?s=20
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.
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.
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.