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How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

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Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#41

Post by HeartStrings »

nandomrumber wrote: post #9
kaycebasques wrote: post #6

> 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 bet…

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

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#42

Post by esperent »

dvt wrote: post #2

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 rev…

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.

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#44

Post by 4bpp »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #40

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 empt…

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).

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#45

Post by metalman »

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

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#46

Post by fhars »

sph wrote: post #23
krackers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 vapor…

Yeah, even nostalgia is no longer what it used to be...

Welcome to old age :-).

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#47

Post by acidhousemcnab »

dvt wrote: post #2

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 rev…

Anti-space, no space, nothingness - annihilation.

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#48

Post by Schlagbohrer »

esperent wrote: post #42
dvt wrote: post #2

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 rev…

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. I…

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.

Re: How liminalism became the defining aesthetic

#49

Post by XorNot »

Terr_ wrote: post #36
Jordan-117 wrote: post #24

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, sty…

> 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…

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.

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