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Tangent: Liminal Spaces (Patreon)

Published:
2023-06-16 16:24:45
Edited:
2023-10-13 19:07:55
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hi friends,

Here's the "May" Tangent, on liminal spaces. Truly I will try to get back on schedule by the end of this month. This one is the most high-effort Tangent to date. I've been working on it for the last week and a half. I just couldn't bring myself to half-ass this one, partly because I found myself getting strangely passionate about the topic, and partly because I'd outlined ideas for a similar video essay in 2020 that I never ended up making. So this was my chance.

The result is a Tangent that's 3/4 of the way to being a main channel video essay. I almost regret that I didn't just put in another few weeks of work and upgrade it. It would need a bit of pruning certainly, some reorganization, a script instead of an outline. But I think parts 2 and 3 in particular are almost main channel ready as they are.

For the next couple Tangents I'm really going to have to force myself to put in less effort, since the whole point of these is that they take only a few days, so I can post monthly content here while still having enough time to work on main-channel videos. I have to convince myself that it's okay to be incomplete, that I can always revisit the subject matter later on main. Or in other Tangents. I certainly expect I will plunder ideas from this one in future videos.

Anyway, this has been too much tangential preface to an already very tangential tangent. I'll stop typing now—enjoy!

Thanks as always for your support,

-Natalie

Files

Tangent: Liminal Spaces

Thanks so much for your support! ▬ Contents▬ Part 1: Liminal Spaces 00:19 Part 2: Liminal Art 22:47 Part 3: Nostalgia 36:30 Part 4: Hauntology 49:15 Part 5: The Uncanny 58:31 Part 6: The Eerie 1:12:27 Part 7: What Does It All Mean? 1:19:00

Comments

Ted(dy)

we love a relentless high effort queen

Tasha J

Honestly for the past several months my 7 year old has been obsessed with, direct quote, "the aesthetics of liminal spaces" (she's autistic and it's her current t obsession) so this is just perfect serendipity! Thank you as always!

Ted(dy)

fr tho definitely go easy on yourself in the future!

highclass_lady

This is super fucking liminal! Thank you! 💜

Matty Z Naps

I just started rewatching another tangent a few minutes ago because I was missing these. We appreciate your dedication to the content! Excited for this one

Mikaela Cortez

Girl, I love your tenacity—it is inspiring

Captain Morgan

Thank you Natalie! As a brand new Patron, I'm excited to explore your world of tangents!

Tomás Tomcat

So excited for this! Also please take care of yourself and it's OK to make tangents not take a million years ♥

thequeerquartz

i like the idea of monthly tangents being like rough drafts of main channel topics! put in as much effort as you like to get the video out and then move on, that way whenever you want to revisit it for the upgrade you'll have the benefit of whatever work you already put in.

Connor

thank you for blessing me with this on this unholy drunken night

Syndicated Dream

Ma'am is there a rule that says you can't do a tangents as a series for bigger thoughts? Why not have chunks of content-you can release bursts of so you don't have to compromise the vision and you can still trickle out little pieces to us thirsty fish

Pee She-Her Man

When life gives you liminals, make liminade. I'm so excited for this <3

Kevin King

We're already on the road to hell, we may as well pave it with good intangents.

bins

Thank you for writing these Ms

Sarah

thanks :)

Noah Carlin

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUR

Jessica Cheeri

I love it when you make videos about the things you are passionate about regardless of the amount of time they take. They always end up very impressive Places that feel dreamlike. So many of my dreams have labyrinthine architecture and yeah, I'd say that's definitely true when I go to a complex subway or train station. Very liminal indeed

Yousuf Kazmi

Maybe if the top voted Tangent makes a good main channel video, the 2nd placed subject becomes the Tangent and the winner is the next Main Channel video, adding to the voting level reward :) Tbf, it's Nat's Trainset she can do what she likes !

CrystalJade

Tangents are liminal. Tangents about liminality are super fucking liminal! Only half way through this one and my enjoyment was disturbed by the real world. I had been thinking back to the feeling I used to get as a kid when I had recurring dreams that time stopped for everyone apart from me. They weren’t scary dreams, but instead were really eerie. Like I could go and explore anywhere but everywhere was perfectly silent. Was I dreaming about liminal spaces back in the 1980’s?

Iceberg Tech

I also like to think that I could have invented the whole “liminal space” thing. I was an arty farty photography student in the early ‘00s, and I loved to photograph the absence of humans- spaces designed for people, sans the people, that kind of thing. Sadly I was also very lazy, so not many pictures were taken. My favourite was of a phone booth in the early hours of the morning outside of an abandoned pub.

Patryk Zep

Of course it's perfectly fine to be incomplete and you can always revisit the subject matter later on main. Or in other Tangents!

lyonne crawford

BABE WAKE UP CONTRAPOINTS LIMINAL SPACES TANGENT JUST DROPPED ‼️

lyonne crawford

This is such a perfect intersection of a lot of my interests very grateful 🙏

Rick Griffin

I keep thinking of things to comment and then you keep bringing it up, I GUESS I have to listen to the end

Rachel Fung

Thank you for your hard work on this. I'm in a dark bedroom with my Burmese cat snuggled into the crook of my leg, myself in the (admittedly, banal) liminal space of insomnia right now. It's nice to see I've got this video essay to look forward to in the morning.

Seed Oil Sommelier

I really appreciate the frank discussion of the risks of nostalgia. I think about it a lot because I’m a really nostalgic person and I think it might render me susceptible to reactionary rhetoric.

Alex

Seriously no shade you’re doing amazing. I always loved the amas but I feel like I would get impatient wanting one so bad, whereas with these tangents they are often enough that I get a nice surprise when the next one comes out. I think we all truly appreciate the commitment and the hard work getting so much content out so frequently. Thanks Natalie, well worth the patreon.

michael mcgrath

All these anthropologists making me miss undergrad thank u Natalie for taking me back this fucking rules. Reading Turner and Levi-Strauss and Douglas shaped my world at 18 so fun to see it talked about in this way.

Rhoda Perdition

Favorite liminal space where I live is Vermontasaurus in Post Mills, Vermont... It's a collection of barn wood sculptures on the side of a grass airfield and the whole place is so bizarre and dreamlike. I've never seen another person there before. The "airport" is a long wooden building that has sewing machines in every window. There are hot air balloon baskets and an outdoor piano, and cars that have weeds growing through them. There's no cell signal, so you can't use GPS to get out of there. 10/10 would recommend!

Whatever

Great tangent. I wish you luck on learning how to make and release videos that take less effort in the future.

Jacob V

I tried to read Specters of Marx eight years ago and failed but the idea of hauntology has stuck with me. Thank you for the great content Natalie

Austin F

as someone who spent my late adolescence on tumblr (used it starting in april 2012, when i was 15, and stopped around 2019), hearing that a major subgenre was influenced so much by the nonsense that we posted when we were teenagers, the place where popular posts include "you are the shit lord of piss mountain" and "horses won't be called horses anymore", is unbelievably bizarre and unsettling

I S

More videos on aesthetics please- this was great!

Rick Griffin

OKAY SO I'm not sure how much I could add to this because it's fairly well-covered, but I do have some thoughts. 1. A while ago, I posted on twitter about the common analysis of Vaporwave as "the lo-fi aesthetic creates a nostalgic liminal space of a dying genre. Then I read analysis and everyone ELSE agrees the same, only it's supposed to be sarcastic." Did you ever get that feeling? That the "capitalism in ruins" view of Vaporwave can't be nostalgic, because nostalgia is weaponizable. Positive feelings are not valid, because Some People take nostalgia as though it's a revealer of truth; "I felt this way once, but it has been stolen from me." I look at nostalgia, though, as some superposition of potential. I have no idea if "the way things were going" could have been better or worse. They existed once, they exist no longer, and now it exists (or at least can exist) as a kind of Gothic experience. Feeling adrift and bittersweet for a lost and dying time is, to me, kind of the fun. The haunting is rife with potential. It's like the dungeons in Zelda games; we don't experience these places in their hypothetical height, but rather confront them as a ghost of some unknowable past built for enigmatic purpose. Exploring these places *as memories* is, in some ways, more interesting than they would have been at their height. 2. There's a side to this that I don't think I saw a lot of, but I get the liminal feeling from large industrial spaces. Portal 2 had a ton of these and it's one of my favorite liminal games for that reason. I don't have any personal attachment to industrial spaces but they feel overwhelming to take in scope; they are not places I've been to often or ever worked at, so there's no familiarity to me except in this sense that machines *ought* to be familiar, but the scale has been blown out of proportion. The preview of Armored Core 6 did something to me in that the industrial facility depicted is absolutely *staggering* in size, miles upon cubic miles of machinery, well beyond the ability of any one designer or engineer to even contemplate. At a certain point it starts to become almost eldritch; is this thing, undoubtedly wrought by human hands, even still under human control? Is it even possible to manage something so impossibly enormous? 3. My moment of understanding liminal space was in the not-infrequent car trips I took as a child, and I always had this feeling that truck stops in the middle of nowhere, especially early in the morning or late at night, were like this last bastion against the apocalypse. I know, intellectually, that these things only operate on frequent behind-the-scenes logistics, but they also felt to me like how other people experience hotels: eternal present. If the world was ending in an alien invasion or something, I could sit on the roof of the Flying J and watch it all with a sense of detachment. It's kind of a cruel fantasy, but it's one that feels rife with similar potential nevertheless. I think the game Paradise Killer tapped into that feeling for me.

Liam Hughes

I mean - you know we'll watch it again if you turn it into a main channel vid, right?!

thequeerquartz

this liminal video. halfway between tangent and main video

nimbledickcrabb

every tangent we get closer to the witch trials of sigmund freud

Conzeit

I am having thoughts while watching the video...I thought why not share em here? On the Pandemic: I have an opposite experience of when everyone was in lockdown. when liminal spaces were everywhere I did not feel fear or apprehension, I felt exhilaration. I honestly feel estranged in the normal course of life, it is eerie to me that the world keeps going on like normal with everything that is increasingly wrong with the course of humanity, it's like if in the sinking titanic it was not just the violinists but everyone that kept on partying like nothing was going wrong. I knew full well that the cause of that lull was just a tactic for inmediate survival, but there was talk about how human connections were truly the most important thing, and how the enviroment seemed to heal with just a lull in our franctic running around. The general climate in the aftermath doesnt feel substantially more self aware, but maybe it is too early too tell. Nostalgia has become so commonplace and exploited that I'm just inmediately suspicious when it shows up. "nostalgia is just hope pointed backwards" absolutely. yes there were great things in the past but can we please not focus on the fetishistic recreation of the imagery to make us feel a false sense of safety. We can look at what worked and dump the rest, I feel like this separates meaningful revivals like Fury Road from empty nostalgiawank like Force Awakens. Funnily enough Furiosa dumps her nostalgic view of the green place to face that the only thing she has is the potential to reform the hellplace in which she was complying to tyranny, that nostalgia was probably what kept her with enough hope to keep complying. I wonder if that was Miller's response to all the other revivals around him. On the resurgence of childhood fears, I think as we grow up the safety of being with your parents is replaced by the expectation of always recieving the same reaction when we engage in a social interaction, or in the intended appereance of architecture when we traverse it, it becomes instinctual and second nature. But when that is broken by something simple, like being in a strange neigborhood or on a familiar place at strange hours, a slight diference of either time or place, we can easily have that experience of being lost and orphaned again. I feel like there is also something going on here, with us experiencing in real time how iconography that can represent creativity and liberation, is routinely assimilated and integrated by the systems of opression, we had heard old people talk about this but now we're old enough to have felt the impact. When we are children we can believe the genuine appeals for hope and that sense that we as individuals matter in the way progress happens in our manmade world, but as we grow we realize that it being welcoming to us is an extremely fragile thing, made evident by just a slight change in time or place that reveals the inhumanity of it's structures when we see them in a context separated from it's intended purpose. I think the deep fear underlying this sensation is the inhumane passing of history, how we dont make change in the world, but we are forced endure it, and the deep underlying knowledge that were we ever caught in the wrong combinations of characteristics that would make US eerie or uncanny to IT, all of it would become an unstoppable unfamiliar force that wouldnt flinch to crush us if we were ever in it's way.

James Todino

Maybe it's silly of me getting sentimental about a video essay, but there's something I found very moving about this in a way I struggle to put my finger on. The way you tied this back to childhood fear, nostalgia, a past dream of a future that no longer exists, the desire to escape into the safety of an empty place - you've managed to take a set of images and examine them in a way that poignantly explores the human condition in the modern world. I feel In the end this video became much more than the some of it's parts Despite not knowing much about liminal images, I found myself relating to a lot of the feelings you described in the video. It reminded me of the song 'Killing me softly' - the idea of someone you've never met writing something that uncannily describes your own life. I don't know whether you intended to infer this, but I gather that our response to liminal spaces is in part a reflection of ourselves - when confronted with a space of absence, we are forced to be with our own thoughts and become self reflexive Thanks for the hard work btw! Looking forward to more future tangents

Ryan Storey

I second this. I'm here because I support Natalie and her endeavors, not for the perks.

Kim Fu

If you chose to edit the transcript of this into a script, refilm it in a series of liminal spaces, work your general production magic, and upload it as a main channel video, I as a patron would be totally fine with that. The patron benefit would then be getting to see this bts early-draft version. I hope you don't feel like making this tangent means you would need radical reinvention and tons of work from scratch before you're "allowed" to make a main channel video about the topic.

Ryan Storey

That being said, I don't think she actually makes much, if any at all, from her actual videos. Her content is not very "advertiser-friendly" and she's never done sponsors, so most of her money actually comes from Patreon. Last I remember, anyway. Things could have changed.

Ricky G.

The surreal feeling of watching this video where Natalie talks about the liminality of The Matrix scene with wing back chairs around a fire place while she jokes about her decor mimicking that scene while I myself watch this in a room with wingback chairs around a fire place. Wonderful work Natalie. Love <3

Christopher B

I don't think I knew this feeling was so important to me until you told me it was a feeling

CrystalJade

Beautiful tangent Natalie. Although I love your main channel creations, it feels to me like you give us so much more in tangents. What I like most is how you don’t create an explicit dialectic to explain things. It’s more of a direct approach. That said, please make this all work for you. I’m sure you’ll find a sweet spot! Thank you!

Amalia

For me, liminality has a lot to do with death. Liminal spaces make me think of an afterlife - empty, silent, perpetual, alone. It also has to do with the common retro overlay in the liminal aesthetic, with a forever-vanished past. Walking through a liminal space makes me feel like a ghost.

rapchee

"vaporwave was ...." AH exuuse me, IS

Louise Howard

Have you ever been in the Hunt Valley Inn in Cokiesville Maryland? It is filled with so many liminal spacey it could be used in a Kubrick movie.

Matthew Mendenhall

I am so thankful that this democracy is functional enough to elect Natalie to discuss aesthetics again. :’)

Linh Dao

Omg watching it while reviewing a lead that’s called liminal.app completely by accident for my job 🤯 eerie

Emma Salankey

I feel like a renter in this world... damn

Lulzquirrel

I kept thinking of Rene Magritte when you mentioned artists of the liminal and the eerie. Thought you would have brought him up. Great tangent and love the Super Eyepatch Wolf shout out.

kkikibunny

so much of maryland has such weird vibes

Mary Bedell

I know you were raised in North Virginia, did you ever go to Port Discovery children's museum in Baltimore? The Candlecove creepy pasta reminded me of an exhibit that was there in the early 2000s when I was a child called Miss Perception's Mystery House. The house involved kids walking through to 'solve' mysteries of the disappearance of a family, most of them through somewhat funny ways (the daughter used a vanishing cream on her pimple and turned invisible, etc.) What stuck with me the most was discovering a fridge with a human head in a jar. I recently googled it just because I was so certain that I must have dreamed it, but no, there was a Reddit thread of people discussing their memories. Millennial children's entertainment was weird, man. Anyway I went there for a job interview recently and that exhibit was gone, but they did show me a fragment of the exhibit that was left partially built in a storage area. Now that was super fucking liminal.

Linh Dao

Have you read “bittersweet” by Susan Caine? She basically argued life itself is liminal! She doesn’t use that word but I feel like she might as well. The “bittersweet” as she calls it is how you realize the perfect and beautiful world will never be touchable and yet we are here living and existing anyway

Mollie Cahill

So, not to be that guy, buuuuuut.... You could go to ChatGPT and say can you take the notes I have listed under #1 and turn them into a script in the style of #2? And then copy & paste notes for your tangent video and a portion of a main video script and see if it comes up with anything halfway decent. I do this for work reports all the time, which granted don't have to sound particularly unique or stylized, but it could potentially expedite the process of making main channel video and/or tangent vids

Mollie Cahill

I only say this because you seemed to be expressing angst about not wanting to post less-than-quality work - I would be fine if you just talked at the camera for 90 minutes with no cuts 😂

Mollie Cahill

It's also possible you've tried this and it sucked but I have to be reminded chatgpt exists half the time so just in case...

M.m. Wright

The second Alice in Wonderland book has a chess motif, maybe origin of liminal checkerboard?

Bárbara Santos

okay so I don't really feel anything seeing these pictures and I'm a little worried I'm, like, missing a human experience or whatever; but also there's only 01 person who'd make me watch a video over an hour long about hallways so.... here we gooooo

James Ross

Your Spirited Away segment really struck a chord with me. You see, my first job was doing the early morning shift at a grocery store in my local neighbourhood. I got this job in my gap year between graduating high school and going to college (my parents didn’t have enough money to send me off to college so I saved it up myself using this job). I remember cycling at 4am, in the dark, through empty suburbia to with orange streetlights all by myself. Then arriving at this copy/paste square building that was my grocery store. Then working the aisles before the store opened. I also experienced the exact same character archetypes as Chihiro: the exploitative tyrant boss, the other rude workers except a handful who have your back. A few months into this job my shifts even got moved 30 mins later in the morning, this meant was able to take the first metro train in the day at 5am (like the train scene in spirited away) No one else on the train but me. To make it even more liminal, station I got off at for this job was also a terminus. End of the line… 10 months later, I finally saved up enough money to leave for college and start a new chapter in my life. I remember my last day at that liminal store, I handed in my keys a week earlier as my last “fuck you”. I remember my dad picking me up, giving me a lift in his car. It was sunny and people everywhere, the exact opposite of what I had experienced. I felt exactly like Chihiro at the end of spirited away. Being ready to go off to college, having successfully saved up enough money. I can’t thank you enough Natalie for articulating this fundamental feeling. Thank you so much. This video is complete artistry. Thank you. ❤️

Sam T

This was an amazing video, thank you so much for making it! I work in Owings Mills and seeing the mall footage was low-key like a jumpscare but now I see why all my older coworkers make such a big deal when they talk about it.

Grady Wiehe

Natalie! You need to book a trip to SF ASAP! As the epicenter of the pandemic remote work trend businesses are pulling out of downtown SF at an alarming rate. For perhaps the first time in this country we have a major metropolitan urban core that is essentially all one big abandoned mall. I was walking through Union Square yesterday, and those are some choice liminal vibes.

Damon Harris

Wow......this is why they throw out phrases like, "The Oscar Wilde of YouTube" when describing your work. I have never been so happy to lose a vote. Personally, I think this might be one of my favorite videos that you have done periodt. In terms of content, it definitely is. Where were these takes when I was getting my MFA? I feel much like I did after seeing Opulence and Envy, that something fundamental to my experience was just articulated, reframed, and connected to a larger context. I would LOVE to see this as a main channel video, meaning that I would love to see the costumes, looks, sets, and visuals that you would come up with to accompany this script. Thank you for this!

Conzeit

Large industrial spaces feel like a temple not for a god, but the onslaught of industry, Clearly if we are anything in this space it is just the most unreliable and undesirable cog.

M.m. Wright

And I just saw the nails . . .

Malorie

Can i get a supercut of natalie just showing pictures of liminal spaces and saying "this is super fucking liminal" ?

Grady Wiehe

Also, I’d hazard a guess that the checker floor motif may relate to the liminal in that it delineates space the way a grid does. It’s making visible kind of the dimensional structure of physical space. Each line of the grid is essentially a mini threshold.

Blaire Frei

How perfect that I watched this video in a hotel buffet as they transitioned from lunch to dinner.

Damon Harris

Side note: The older aesthetic concept of the sublime is another that seems connected to liminal spaces and experiences in some ways, but is fundamentally different in others. I am having thoughts.

Amy Forest

Natalie, my tran, you can always upgrade it to full video whenever you want to. Would love to see it cross that threshold if you ever get to it :)

Grady Wiehe

The way the practice of designing (a space for example) often begins with reference to a grid as a kind of blank canvas onto which the structure and context is overlayed

Esme

This reminds me a lot of a Dr Who episode where all these characters are staying at an earth-style hotel on a different planet. It's called "The God Complex" I believe? It's not 100% liminal because each room does contain like, a specific type of horror for each character, but I remember there being a lot of liminal imagery with all of the hotel hallways, and also playing on the fear of the unknown, with not knowing what was in each room/being trapped in a transitory space (the hotel). Edit: 'Submechanophobia' is another thing that seems like an offshoot of liminal spaces. I remember seeing it a lot on tiktok during the pandemic - again, it's definitely a genre of horror but has liminal aspects too.

Emma Bjork

Nice video! The Macintosh Plus song made me remember one of my favorite bits from one of your videos, where the Age of Empires II monk sings along to Floral Shoppe

Ryan Storey

No game honestly captures liminal spaces quite like Super Mario 64. The castle that the game primarily takes place in is empty, full of these surreal colors and designs, but yet completely empty except for a few Toads here and there. The levels themselves are for the most part empty and sparse with enemies. I think this vibe comes across because it's such an old game with outdated visuals and sounds, and the N64's hardware could only do so much. It's the same feeling you probably get from watching a really old movie from the 1930s. The entire game's atmosphere feels dreamlike and eerie, like something is "off". And again, this is purely a byproduct of it being a really old game and one of the first 3D games ever made. But this sort of atmosphere is present in a lot of games from this era (N64, PlayStation 1, etc.).

Ryan Storey

32:58 "Chihiro learns... life lessons about hard work or something idk" I mean, actually... 😂 People forget, but for how wholesome Miyazaki's films are, he's always been kind of a cranky old man. Apparently, his inspiration for the movie and for specifically Chihiro's character was his friend's 10-year-old daughter who he described as a "lazy bum".

Beth Jerky

as a visual artist i am SO TIRED OF THAT DAMN WORD

Crissa Kentavr

I worked at Vallco (another mall frequently shared) and it went through many cycles in its last twenty years of death before it was demolished. Walking through it with the music going and all the empty stores on the locked off level... for awhile it had atriums that were blocked off, but you could still look down in them from the top floor. It was weird they never stopped the music, very odd place.

Crissa Kentavr

If she's in the spaces, they're no longer liminal... Unless it's like, a walking tour.

triggthediscovery

For the checkerboard, I think there's something to be said about how often checkerboards show up in optical illusions. There's an interesting phenomena where the brain will see a small chunk of checkerboard, and hallucinate/extrapolate the rest. This usually isn't noticeable, but can be exploited to make cool optical illusions if tweaked slightly. some examples - http://brainden.com/line-illusions.htm

Alice

Great video! I can relate to how liminal spaces can feel refreshing when you feel disconnected from your past & future.

M. A.

Wake up, Number 37.

Beth Jerky

also, A+ per usual. when you said "melancholic nostalgia" it made me wonder if you'd read Celeste Olalquiaga's "the Artificial Kingdom"

M. A.

Another thing that has always fascinated me is old generative sound/art/video spam that predates generative AI. They all had this eerie familiarity to them, as if they were somehow derived from something more recognizable. A typical example is weird voice-like sounds that don't actually say anything. I think a lot of these have been "solved" now, but Unfavorable Semicircle, Webdriver Torso, radio number stations, etc. were all interesting rabbitholes...

Oscar Thompson

ok so i was an art theory major and years ago i tried to write up a semi-academic theory to explain feelings invoked by 'cursed images' and this video is uncannily similar, like down to it quoted like 5 of the exact same sources (but this is just so so so much better lol) Thank you so much for this video, never before has there been a contrapoints video so near and dear to my special interests and it was such a blast to watch.

Dave L

Yes.

Emerson Whittaker

Wow, this video was awesome and has given me a lot to think about! When I first found out about liminal spaces during the summer of 2020, I too remember feeling this exhilaration not only with the images, but having the sense that I was not the only one of my kind, like someone had taken my innermost subconscious and my dreams and put them into a Youtube video. I think the proliferation of the internet along with covid-19 has resulted in this collective loss of innocence, where average people are all more hyperaware of the problems and complexities of the world than they used to be in a pre-internet world, where all news was funneled through maybe 3 television channels and the encyclopedia, making us feel haunted by our dead ideas of a bright future. I think you're right that this feeling is enhanced by transness. As a nonbinary person, liminal spaces feel like an honest recognition of my reality, and an invitation to rest in a place where time stands still.

Eric Kaplan

I was into a liminal space in the 1970s because I went to a synagogue with a dwindling aging population in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that had once been Jewish but was now largely Haitian and Cambodian, and once my friends and I snuck down the stairs and discovered an abandoned ballroom that hadn't been used in decades and that nobody talked about. There was a stage, there was a carpet with a pattern on it that had once been colorful and now wasn't, piled up chairs, the whole scene was dark and dusty. I think liminal spaces let us confront our fears of our own non-existence -- either after we die or before we were born. But they are strangely comforting because we are there observing, so they give us the feeling that we may be immortal. It's like the experience of being a ghost observing the world gong on without us.

Kiki

Amazing video!! I noticed the checkerboard floor/liminal thing too (when watching what else but Twin Peaks). Perhaps it has something to do with perspective— crossed lines as the base starting point for denoting the solid ground in an otherwise blank space, especially when drawing in single-point perspective. & in film or photography, those strong lines and shapes become definitional to the frame that contrasts with the undefined nature of the liminal space. like a chessboard— an empty field where the rules and movement are governed. and ofc that element of nostalgia bc they are popular in certain architectures— florentine renaissance churches, victorian mansions, vintage kitchens, gas stations

Eric Kaplan

I think maybe checkerboard floors are liminal b/c they are a human design feature but they give you nothing. I feel the same way about piles of folded chairs.

satb90

Best tangent yet!

Tetraali

Wow, this video is blowing my mind. My plan was to listen to it as a "podcast" while a cook, but it's too damn interesting so that I actually need to FOCUS on it and to pause on every image to enjoy the liminal vibes. Looking back, I have many memories of places that were liminal AF, but I've never had a word for them, until now. For example, the time when I walking to a bus stop at 3AM, to catch a bus that would take me to the airport to get to another country. I remember having a feeling that was somewhere between sad and excited. Not scared. I think I was actually just feeling liminal.

Lauren Danielle

I particularly loved the part where you talked about what it means to be a liminal being--that being comfortable being mutable and transitory is very much a part of who you are and for others, specifically those who tend to be more conservative, there is a kind of horror in that which is not fixed (unclear/unclean). I think about this concept endlessly, especially in conjunction with Julia Kristeva's work on abjection. This generalized reaction to that which does not to remain within clean categories fuels so much of human behavior--it's a through-line of so much of your work as well; it's the underscore of all conservative fear mongering. I would love to hear more on what takes something from simply uncanny (which at least in my opinion, is categorized as unnerving, but still relatively benign) to abject. I will definitely be reading that Douglas book!

Morg

God this was phenomenal. Honestly wish the main channel video could've been made. Also was totally expecting you to talk about Coraline! Great rabbit hole scene. *FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST: BROTHERHOOD SPOILERS* Another example that I just thought of would be the Gate of Truth from Fullmetal Alchemist. Particularly how similar Ed and Al look, while not twins, they look unique, and very obviously related, in contrast to all the other contemporary characters. However, this is when you look at them both as children. When the show takes place, one brother is stuck in another world behind this Gate of Truth, along with his brother's severed limbs. Also the concept of a "transitory" being, a homunculus, created from failed human transmutation, or even that of the failed chimera crafted by Tucker, which also evokes the dread of loneliness. The fact that human souls are preserved within these philosopher's stones that retain consciousness in a dreadful limbo where they feel suffering but do not have a physical form. Ok I should also out down the joint.

Talia Street

Great video! I think I find liminal spaces more unsettling than most people. This video got me thinking it could have something to do with my temporal lobe epilepsy. TLE seizures are highly associated with deja vu, and it's a common symptom for me. The temporal lobe also controls fear, and I experience fear during focal seizures. I've had it my whole life, and most of that time my seizures have been controlled. But even when they're controlled, I still experience fear more strongly than most and I suspect that it's because of the epilepsy. I think liminal spaces invoking deja vu and feelings of eeriness maybe subconsciously reminds me of times where I was not seizure free. I'll have to reach out to my epilepsy support group and see if this is a common experience. This video really explained to me why some movies and places left me feeling deeply unsettled. I remember being so creeped out by Alice in Wonderland as a child. I also went to Las Vegas with my wife's family for the first time in 2019, and I felt so unsettled almost the whole time I was there, and I couldn't really explain why. Anyways, this comment would probably be better left in my journal haha! Thanks for giving me a lot to think about as always Natalie :)

Francesca Zadra

I'm amused at all the 80s neon in some of these kinds of images because, while nostalgia certainly plays a part, Miami Vice was about 95% liminal spaces and 5% actual plot, and that was in the actual 80s.

Rachel Muir

Fascinating, Natalie -- I had identified such feelings before and found that I often sought out such spaces. The basement at the Library of Congress? I have news for you; the Mall is crisscrossed with these spaces and tunnels. I worked at the Old Ex, (an amazing building), and its basement has tunnels with low ceilings and pipes and steamy passages going who know where. There is one clue you can check out on the rare snowy day in DC; the snow melts more quickly across the Mall and the Ellipse where there are tunnels below. I believe, but don't know, that they extend all the way to the Senate and House building and their tunnels, (you can get a ride with your Senate or Congress person on their unground mini-trains if you are lucky). Anyway, much to think about. Interesting to me that places in nature -- Yosemite valley, alone in a snow storm -- does not evoke a liminal space vibe fore me at all. Or hiking the trail, alone, that is lined with trees and makes a bend in the distance -- not a liminal space. It pulls me forward. Another great tangent.

Julia Amine

There's Superman episode, written by Alan Moore of course, where a monster uses nostalgia to trap the Heroes. The episode is called For the Man who Has Everything. I'd give it a read. It also deals with right wing themes on Krypton.

mfar

“please don’t click away” oh baby this is what made me subscribe in the first place

JessicaM

I think the checker board flooring could just be a nostalgia thing. It was a pretty common flooring for a long time and used often in hallways and kitchens. And like hallways and strange kitchens are like super fucking liminal. Basically it reminds us of places that haven't been renovated before 2003.

Roisin Isner

maybe the checkerboard floor gives a sense of scale and emphasizes distance in liminal spaces with fewer reference points for scale/distance

Oscar De León

Wonderful topic, I'm feeling like Natalie said, all my childhood I've always felt something I coudnt explain when I was a this spaces. Also feel glad for the spongebob references, the art design of this show is so liminal that I wanted to live there. All this tangent remembered me a ton of movies too, one of them is mistery train by Jim Jarmusch, where the city of Nashville is a complete liminal space. Highly recomended. Thank you Natalie for this content <3

Christopher B

I think the checker board motif might be liminal due to the requirement of human design for something to be liminal. An array of meters and meters of geometric square tiles is an incredibly unnatural motif. There's that famous video clip of a cuttlefish trying (and in my opinion not really succeeding) to camouflage themselves in a water tank with a checkerboard floor. I'd say it's even more artificial than carpet and not elaborate enough to fill a place up to be a destination onto itself

Neil

This was so cathartic!

Milena D.K.

Omg checkerboard floor! It’s everywhere in Madoka Magica, a really great anime that deconstructs the magical girl genre. The main characters fight against ‘witches,” monsters that live in labyrinths — magical lairs connected to this world. When characters enter these labyrinths, the animation becomes intensely psychedelic with checkered motifs everywhere. Now that I think about it, Madoka is an extremely liminal anime. It’s characters are highly volatile adolescents whose life is “in between” the magical and mundane realms. The animation is also amazing and worth checking out if you like the liminal aesthetic.

Frankie Andrien

not to be weird and quasi-poetic and rambly in your comments, but it's like 2:30am and i just watched eighty minutes of rambling about The Weird Quasi-Poetry Aesthetic, so i feel like it's a forgivable sin. anyway, as a fellow renter in the world (who has recently found a better landlord and a new appreciation for their roommates), i do really love this video. last year i was going through a hell of a time in my relationship. there was a public playground and a bridge near our place, and whenever things got to be too much, i went to the playground and sat on the swings for a while, or i wandered underneath what i termed "the yelling bridge" and. yelled. only ever at night, though. suuuuuper fucking liminal. i think there's a draw to the liminal for anyone in a situation that feels inescapable. if actually reaching some other place is a fantasy, then it's very comforting to be somewhere that is On The Way to another place, somewhere that's between your current situation and something different. you might not feel at home or comforted when put in a Better spot because you don't belong there, but in an In-Between spot, *you* will never be the thing that doesn't belong. similarly, i think that draw exists for people who have complications with both hope AND nostalgia. i'd say the quintessential poetic experience of liminality is hope/nostalgia as you described, but pointed neither forwards nor backwards. i wasn't really able to imagine my relationship getting better in the future-- and of course, it was loads better in the past, but in the past we were also queer teenagers in texas repressing the hell out of everything and then some, so nostalgia for the *start* of the relationship was out of the question. under a bridge, you can have a feeling like hope and not actually need a place to put it. i didn't have to know whether i was looking for a return or an escape, just that i didn't want my situation to be permanent. i couldn't find a vector for my longing, so i just kind of let it pool around me. the feeling of "nostalgia for a time you've never known" is so much more comfortable when you phrase it as "nostalgia for right now." "nostalgia for a time *in between* all the times you've experienced." "nostalgia for a time that may or may not be at the end of this empty hallway." maybe it verges towards the unsettling when it goes from "not requiring direction" to "taking away direction." an abandoned toys r us isn't saying "you can feel this sense of hope and this sense of pain without giving it an object," it's saying "the object of your hope and pain is gone. now where will you put the feelings?" the poetic experience is no longer freedom from having to hope from tomorrow or pine after yesterday, it is a reminder that so long as it is today, tomorrow and yesterday will both be inaccessible anyhow. to put it in a stupidly grandiose-sounding way, the present is liminal, and layering a physically liminal location on top of that shifts our perspective of "now" from "its own state distinct from other times" to "a designation that only exists to be in between the past and the future." for those who want change, it's liberating, and for those who want stability, it's unsettling. nowadays, i find that i gravitate less towards the liminal than i used to. i visit the park outside my apartment at 5 pm, when it's full of people. i walk around downtown, or go to bars sometimes. i'm able to take comfort in the presence of society in a way that i fully thought it impossible for me to do. similarly, i've developed the ability to be nostalgic. texas, my least favorite relatives, and my old couple's pictures are all things that i resented as someone who was Trying To Leave, but i have genuine love for each of them when i interact with them as someone who Has Left. it's not classical nostalgia because i have no desire to return to any of those things-- it's more that none of them ever fully left me, and i'm now finally in a position to decide which elements i want to keep as well as which i want to leave behind. good things are easy to appreciate in transition, but shitty ones are best viewed from the opposite side of an essential binary, so as to avoid the concern that they'll end up on the Non-opposite side of that binary. i still *like* liminal spaces-- probably because i still feel fundamentally comforted by the idea that the entire world has always been and will always be in flux-- but i don't depend on them the way i did a year ago. anyway this like really got away from me and is a completely embarrassing length for a comment on someone else's post to be lmfao. i'll sign off by saying that i'm never again calling myself non-binary; i am a liminal being now.

Frankie Andrien

that's fascinating! i feel like it does kind of explain why checkerboards might be liminal outside of freemasonry as well. the "checkered with both good and evil" bit jumped out at me as a kind of "oh well if we're looking at muddying the boundaries and questioning the idea that everying is in neat little black and white boxes, what's more emblematic than covering the whole entire floor in neat little black and white boxes? let's show both sides of the binary is this space that lies between them." thank you i get it now

Milena D.K.

I wonder who the “Soviet liminal aesthetic” is actually for. Growing up in ex-Yugoslavia, these commieblocks are super cozy: even in winter there are always people walking around them, little markets on the first floor, playgrounds and parks between apartment buildings. Hell, I live in a 50’s brutalist building and often hear the laughter and voices of kids playing in the playground below me. I’d guess the target audience is Americans and other westerners who have never visited these places. Now contrast this to American suburbs where there is almost no one walking around, only the empty gaze of car headlights passing by…

Paul Betti

One more checkboard explanation attempt since giving answer to a long waited question from Queen N seems to bring a great amount of prestige haha, i have the feeling that the liminality of checkboards resides in their ability to question the nature of reality by being a game-like design. is reality designed/controled by someone else, is my reality a place where someone else's game unfolds, if reality has this game-like feeling and aspect what are the consequences on its rules and structure. it produces these type of questions that makes experienced reality, or the reality of media characters, quite unsettling.

Fruit Basket Case

Thank you for helping me articulate a feeling I have experienced but could never pinpoint. As someone born in Latin America, most images and examples used to describe liminal spaces don't evoke the nostalgia or sense of lost time that some people describe. That is why I was so puzzled why many people online were so fascinated by these images. In my case, I felt like a spectator staring at the lost past of people very far away from me (aka I feel something, but that something is not meant for me). So, for me, most liminal photos only evoke eeriness, uncanniness, and emptiness. The description of liminality as an aesthetic and emotion that avoids description is spot on. Yet, most artifacts/examples of prompting them are overwhelmingly Americanized. But now, looking back at old pictures of the city I grew up, I can finally understand that they are"super fucking liminal" to me.

Jack Dover

Somehow the concept of liminal spaces had completely missed me by, but it really resonated with me and I enjoyed this video hugely. One reflection I did have is that, as a Brit, I found that the images you used of (North) American places triggered that liminal feeling for me much more strongly. My initial thoughts on this were that it was due to a combination of these images being slightly more Other to me (we have broadly the same things in Britain but they don’t quite look the same) triggering an uncanniness, as well the general artificiality of things like the American suburbs doing the same thing. As you went on, I wondered whether also there was also an element of something from my childhood being triggered. I was born in 1991 and my childhood was full of images of suburban America via American children’s TV, films, etc. I don’t think I’m exposed to those images to the same degree as an adult and I wonder if they now trigger a dark nostalgia of remembering things I enjoyed as a child, whilst also being aware of how little they resemble what I came to know my life to be as I grew up? Either way super interesting video and I’d be curious to know whether American images (or images from other countries more broadly) trigger this sense more strongly for other people too?

Colton Royle

I now have a good understanding of liminal. Thank you so much! You are such an excellent representation of the power of a good humanities education.

Callum McLean

I hope you feel that you can always "upgrade" these to vids on your main channel and no one here will resent the repetition. I for one would be super thrilled to rewatch a main channel version of any of your tangents – but I love all of them already as they are.

Bipp

Big agree. I think people would really love this as a main upload

Liam Gregory

excellent work as always, Natalie. the research! the connections! never put down the joint!

Wolfebrayne

When I lived in Upstate New York I used to explore abandoned buildings with a buddy. Once, in an old IBM recreational facility in Binghamton, we found giant indoor basketball courts, a pool and a bowling alley. On the wall someone wrote "these people died. And you will too!" This seems hella now liminal in that it makes no judgments on the past; just draws attention to the fact that "the past is dead" and reminds us that we too will go the same way.

marco

I love that these tangents are becoming just as involved as your main channel videos used to be :p

Ava

working overnights at a hotel front desk was super ✨liminal✨

Aderyn Albarelli

Someone did bring up the comfort! 🙌 Been looking back at some feelings the last couple weeks and I remember feeling "free from the gaze of others". Like dancing between, and climbing streetlights. Like pretending to be an airplane, zigzagging down the road at 3 am. no, I wasn't 20 years old! no bulli 😡

Aderyn Albarelli

Never noticed the checkered floor pattern thing before, now I'm trapped in a loop of being bad at Super Mario Bros. 3.

Andrew Hanson

So much of Japanese architecture has this liminal element. The tori gates, and other gates like the Daimon gate in Nara, don't present a physical barrier but more a suggested one between one part of your life and another. Shows up all over the culture with the idea of crossing from one state into another; even just going into your house feels that way.

Maiasia Grimes

Checkerboard floors are liminal because they bring to mind games like checkers and chess where normally we are the players- removed from the game, agents making choices with our own will, people with identities and contexts informing our decisions- and transform us into the pieces on the board- objects whose movements are limited and directed by others. I think it is important to note that many traditional liminal spaces are also directed spaces. Roads, hallways, airports- you cannot move freely within them. A hallway has two directions you can walk, same as a road. An airport has specific areas where people pool, areas where people traverse, and all of that pooling and traversing are specifically guided. So a checkerboard floor is liminal because it brings to mind that sense of being mindlessly guided while ALSO lacking the same guiding signs. For instance, being in an open room with a checkerboard floor would be as liminal as a hallway with a checkerboard floor because the liminality is now a mental experience. Are you or are you not an individual? Are you a game piece on a board being directed or are you a person directing yourself?

Rick Griffin

Additional thoughts: Backrooms: I've sort of thought this about horror for a while, that the monster often seems to condense the atmosphere of horror *locations* to a singular goal and feeling, and it's often been unsatisfying unless it's done very judiciously (like in much analog horror). For this reason I've always liked horror *theoretically* but rarely enjoyed it until I saw something The Monument Mythos. The horror shouldn't just be that there is *a monster* but that the monster is an indelible part of the space. It doesn't necessarily NEED to chase you because it is literally and figuratively inevitable. Spirited Away's central location is also liminal: a bathhouse. Although it is unfamiliar to Western audiences, it's similar to a hotel. Guests are transitory. The place feels unusual when it's empty. If you're used to attending a bathhouse, seeing the employee areas that normally go unseen is liminal. (Kind of like the back hallways of a church... in a high church like catholic sanctuaries, the organs of the building are often blocked off from the attendants, but in a baptist-adjacent low church like I attended they are never hidden. So the church is a CONSTANT liminal space rather than a sanctuary)

Maiasia Grimes

Wrote this comment only 25 minutes in, so if she covered my points in the video, please ignore and don't roast me okiee thx byeeee.

Sev

I can't believe Natalie redpilled her computer room. Great video btw, helps explain why I've always found liminal images strangely comforting.

Jaden Gabban

Great video Natalie! I think the checkerboard floor might be a staple of the liminal aesthetic because it's a famous pattern however we don't see checkerboard floors very often in everyday life, so it's something familiar but put in an unfamiliar setting, which in itself is something found a lot in the liminal aesthetic. Also it being an alternation of identical black and white squares definitely has something to do with it.

Carolina

Something about how you pointed out how liminal spaces have this eerily spooky feeling without being outright scary reminds me of how a lot of latin american authors tend to write, they set this vaguely haunted atmosphere even though nothing outrightly horrific is happening (like monsters, and the like I mean). I've always felt some attraction to that type of art because it mirrors my growing up experience, my parents lived through the military invasion of the US in Panama, and hence carry this trauma that they have passed onto me; I think most people from my generation have a similar experience, the result is this perpetual feeling of defensiveness, of waiting for something to happen, for a bomb to drop, because you've been instructed all your life to beware of it.

Zoë Johanson

Boards of Canada's work feels like the Gen X proto-vaporwave equivalent with the specter of '70s childhoods in place of Millennial-oriented references.

Tales from the jar side

As you described liminal spaces, I kept thinking of the Apple TV series Severance, where everything has that feeling all the time. Even when they are "working" in their open "offices", nothing ever feels like home or even a real destination. It's full of emptiness and stagnation, but somehow in between. Anyway, thank you for an in-depth discussion about a topic I'd never encountered before. Great job. I only hope that eventually you'll make it available to non-Patreons, just so I can share it with others.

Garga Lenoir

"Nostalgia is just hope pointed backwards" is such an awesome sentence!

Anthony Schiappa

I got my BA In popular culture (I know, I know) and the first time I heard about liminality was the mythos of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads at midnight - the implication being that if you linger in a liminal time/space too long and bad things happen. That was the late 90s so I feel like I missed the boat too. I’d vote for the deserted highway, especially in the West, as the quintessential liminal space in American culture. Also the airport, but 10 years in the airline industry destroyed the allure for me!

Ethan Good

This is the best tangent you've done. It embodies everything that makes me love ContraPoints, namely your ability to entertainingly educate at length about some topic I've never heard of before while I listen with rapturous attention. You should absolutely make a main channel video on this topic, even if doing so repeats a lot of these points. I would love to see these ideas presented through characters occupying liminal spaces - perhaps even riffing on familiar ideas, e.g., the rabbit hole and Morpheus.

Teed Rockwell

Very thought provoking. I don't think I will ever see the world the same way again. This idea has now so deeply in my mind, I feel it is possible for me to disagree with you, at least on a few details. Specifically, I do think it is possible to have one or two people in a liminal scene, if they are impossible to directly relate to for some reason. If for example, you don't know them, or their back is turned to you. For that reason I think the Edward Hopper image is liminal even with the people in it, as is the scene with the two people obscured by clouds. If they were people you know, and could talk to, it wouldn't be liminal any more.

Anagram3k

This video is absurdly good. So far, I have enjoyed all the tangents much more than your "main" videos. I don't know exactly why, because the videos on your main channel are well produced and also great. I believe this happens because this format is much more intimate and personal. Creating a unique experience of "knowing you" in a relaxed atmosphere... and with an well researched content, without giving the impression you are even following an script give a me "good feelings". I am very satisfied of enrolling in your patron. And the price is even good for me who live in a third world country. Thanks a lot!

Ju Hana

I was born in a 3rd world country where the push of consumerism wasn’t prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s. I definitely get a kick out of the uncanny and eerie much more than the others. Its more about those childhood fears and superstitions for me. This was a great tangent and best $2 I have ever spent ❤️🫶🏾

David Daut

Was scanning the comments to see if anyone else brought up Severance and here it is. The creator of the series cites the Backrooms sub-genre as a major influence, but if we’re drawing a distinction between the two, I think it falls more in line with liminal spaces artwork, both in its aesthetics and the thematic ends those aesthetics are used for. The most obvious aspect is the severed floor of Lumon Industries as this uncanny office space with its endless empty corridors and its use of retro tech aesthetics without any of the warm nostalgia, but even in the real world, we see Mark’s “outie” living in this sort of perpetual twilight, often alone in empty spaces as his conscious existence only occupies the hours between dusk and dawn. On top of that, as a kind of exaggerated satire of capitalism, it’s interesting to see how the core group of severed workers in MDR map to the different reactions to liminal spaces. For Helly R. it’s eerie and threatening, for Mark S. it’s strangely comforting, albeit with a sort of unplaceable sadness.

Anthony Schiappa

The nostalgia for past faith in the future reminds me “Blinding Lights” by The Weekend. He captures this melancholic feeling in a fun pop sing. I don't know if this was intended, but he put lyrics about an unreachable lover into an overtly 80s synth pop style, and released it into a culture that is overdosing on nostalgia, aware that it’s watching itself hurl itself toward self-destruction.

Tales from the jar side

Fascinating. I hadn't even heard of Backrooms before Natalie's video. All I knew was that I found the whole environment at the company uncomfortable, but I assumed it was because I couldn't figure out how they ever made any money. Thanks for the background info. :)

Darren DM

I have to admit, I wasn't expecting much from this one. Lordy was I wrong! A fascinating video.

Rachel Muir

Liminal experiences are not limited to the visual. Sounds can evoke the same feelings. I have been doing research at a remote field station amid the chapparal/desert of southern California. Near the shack that functions as an office/work space and bunkhouse is an old windmill. The landscape and the windmill are silent for the most part, until the wind changes. Then the vane of the windmill turns with a metallic chank that foretells a change in the wind. Liminal. The sound of a train at night approaching a road crossing. Liminal. The death rattle of my mother, 34 years ago. Liminal. You may have missed the entre of liminal spaces but I give liminal sounds to you.

Alycia Leonard

Okay this is easily one of my favorite things you've ever made?? I know you feel you've missed the boat on sharing it publicly but I really don't think you have, it's so delicious and visceral as a topic and you clearly have a pretty well polished script cooking and I can't imagine what looks you could dream up for it!!!!! If you did feel like producing this one in some form for Ye Olde Tube I think it would absolutely SMASH it!!!!!!

Robert W Bruder

My suspicion is that the reason checkboard floors are liminal has something to do with the repeating pattern messing with our heads. Our minds may unconsciously expect the repeating pattern to continue infinitely despite consciously expecting the floor to end eventually, leaving the subtle, uneasy feeling that the floor should never end.

John Kean

Honestly if you wanted to polish this up into a main channel vid I would not be unhappy about it

Asche Helling

I am sooooo glad you mentioned 'Spirited Away' in this essay. I had a screenshot from the train scene as my laptop background during the most liminal moments of my adult life so far, without properly articulating to myself why I'd chosen it repeatedly. You've helped me name it. This reminds me of the way post-apocalyptic fantasy (ie: The Last of Us, The Road, Bladerunner, etc.) feels strangely comforting to me. I finally had an epiphany recently that apocalyptic fiction is a 'safe' way to reexperience survival mode without having to recreate it in my life. This kind of fiction is a massive service to trauma survivors, giving us an outlet and thereby diffusing the subconscious urge to recreate the toxic-though-familiar circumstances. "What about when our nostalgia is tied to toxicity?" We recreate it--or we geek out about liminal spaces. ;)

C Jose

awesome as always, though I am starting to miss the AMAs, please do one soon!!

Chrombus

How about brutalist architecture?

Casey

Oh my gosh Natalie, amazing! This needs to be a main channel video. Also, I thought of another thing you could include in your main channel video. Halloween. Halloween to me is a comforting liminal space. I love summer and bright colors, but I have depression and so shorter days, longer nights....not good. Halloween for me is nostalgic, liminal, spooky, fun, expressive, and allows me to sit with my darkness without being overwhelmed by the darkness. I love the way people like Danny Elfman and Tim Burton and Ray Bradbury interpret Halloween- not creepy, but eerie, kind of fun and zany, yet profound, yet also nostalgic...I'm probably rambling. Does anyone else listen to vintage Halloween music? Is anyone else disillusioned with Christmas and switching to Halloween?

10 Ten 235 J

The liminal interpretation of the checkerboard, and the meaning of it for Freemasons, is in the fact that they pose a ritual environment where the many apparently binary forms and decisions that constitute mundane life are objectified and flattened, so that “you exist above them.” In addition to this equalizing/neutralizing of “opposite” forms, in lodges Masons are forbidden from discussion things like politics, and from sharing secrets mentioned within the lodge, enabling the space to likewise inhabit a space above or outside of conventional dialectical conflict, and to foster the feeing of liberation. I think all “holy” places are designed to create or simulate this kind of suspense from mundanity, because something like that has always been the ultimate aim of religions and spiritualities, in their ideal form. They see, and/or would like you to see, this WORLD, and yourself, as a liminal, transitional space, between the null and the infinite. I’m not a Mason btw

Austin Luther

This was a fascinating tangent. When I was a kid I loved finding these sorts of places. One of my favorites was a low wall made of lava rocks in the kiawe forest next to my neighborhood (I grew up in Hawaii). How old was this wall? What was it for? Was it built by Hawaiians or was it someone else? Did the ancient Hawaiians actually want to guard from night marchers or was that just recently made up story? I connected with Hawaii as my home but still always felt separated from its history because my family wasn't from there. Super fucking liminal.

Maryanne Cathro

Hi! So, checkerboard floors, I don't think it is a big mystery. Black and white checkerboard floors were the go-to for vestibules, halls and other liminal spaces in hotels, civic buildings, stately homes and cathedrals for centuries. So they got there first. And hence Alice in Wonderland but also, there's a strong connection with parlour games in AiW, chess being one of them and the chessboard is part of that sense of it being inside a game.

Camille Lussier

I was just listening to boards of canada and thinking about how liminal it feels! Nice to see your comment and feel validated.

Magali

Thank you so much I love these themes and the way you build the tangent .Now I have to go rewatch Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) (it’s super fucking liminal in retrospect) Also this gives me a lot to think about on how off season places are so comforting. And underwater pictures sometimes.

Mattias Skagerholm

This was a great tangent on a topic that I really didn't care much about to begin with. You always manage to look at things from so many different perspectives and in ways that make it interesting and make me open my mind and look deeper and more broadly at things. And to make it easier on you to not put to much work into tangents, can't you also keep it open to revisit the subject matter later in another tangent?

Sunbeam

I didn't know how this video was going to be almost an hour and a half long, until I realised I had already watched 50 minutes of it. I loved this so much, especially as someone with no familiarity with cultural theory. The funny thing is that I also got a sense of meta-eeriness from this. I'm between Millennials and Gen Z, and I never got into Internet culture, so the only example, contemporary or historical, that I recognise is from The Matrix. Watching this, I feel like I should be experiencing nostalgia, or familiarity, or at least recollection... but I don't. Uncanny too to realise that so much of my cultural awareness of motifs and trends comes from a sort of osmosis by long-term exposure, with few examples to offer explanation.

Justin Edwards

I would like to thank you for the main channel vid where you mentioned Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman, I've never highlighted so much text in a single book in my life. It's helped me better understand and deal with the really awful relationship I have with my ex, who's kept my kids off me for most of a year now and told me to take her to court if I want to see them again. Nobody can win this, everyone loses, especially the kids who are autistic and have very low understanding. It's a lot, and information/advice that actually make a difference to anything are exceedingly rare. I found you on the recommendation of a Current Affairs article, possibly the best rabbithole I've ever fallen into. Peace and love✌️💖

Martin Barbed

Hi does anybody know the name of the piece of music that plays from around 34:30 to 36:30?? I find it very beautiful

YogaDadBod

Another take on checkboard’s pervasiveness in liminal spaces: right angles do not appear in nature.

Mohammed Osman

I love the intense regret about not having popularized the idea of a liminal space, as if there's some widely known and celebrated originator of the concept to envy lol

Chrombus

How about 2020? Was 2020 liminal?

Zuzanna Maria Tadeusz Amadeusz Mochniej

I think the reason those checkerboard patterned floors might be liminal is because they create an optical illusion, they can elongate the room or the corridor, and the larger the space is, the more uncanny to the eyes it becomes

Delta

i had to click off, i couldnt take the never ending list of literally anything. Its all just photography taken from a nice angle and then edited in post to have fancy lighting.

allocat5867

Thank you for this! What a beautiful description of this concept!

Sophie Jade

lesbian cottagecore potato incident no survivors

e_staff

Ugh I absolutely love how you’ve extended theories of nostalgia here… now I’m thinking about the newest Jordan Peele movie “Nope” as an example of The Liminal in cinema that’s also commenting / meta-commenting on histories of racism & the erasures/ambient fears that have fueled the rise of right wing bad faith racist nostalgia (republicancore?). But the film does it through so much liminal imagery, and even shots that keep you stuck in strange liminal moments (the chimp 😞). Also, YES you are a founding voice in this theoretical space, claim it and own it. Your analysis of malls in Opulence (?) must predate some of the essays you cite… I think you’re it, girlie. Xxxooo big fan, thank you for all you do & share!

jim davies

Eventlessness hiding in the eventual? Such spaces seem to me rich either in invocation or in potential ... & maybe worth considering that "homely" refers to either domesticity or drabness?

Irene Lorenzo

feeling a bit like a liminal space since I broke up with my bf idc if this make no sense at all this is how I feel before watching this video

Daniel Loizos

Hi Natalie! Before I watched this tangent, I had no idea these places had a name or type, but like you, I can spot them a mile off, and they do make me feel something that other places do not. Examples include * Bus stops, when you put a friend/loved one on the bus and will not see them for years * youth hostels (YMCA! kidding!) and the very epitome if liminal (as it tuns out), because of the balance of transience and permanence in them, and more so, when there are didgeridus to hand * airports/the Eurostar terminal, when one is going *on holiday*, but then the feeling is a bit different in the bag collection place on the way *home* from holiday * the whole of Australia * hospices (sorry for this one, but hospices are liminal), because life is fleeting. When one takes a loved one in the ambulance, knowing it's their last car ride, and then they climb into bed, and you know, and they know what is coming. "Liminal" is not just a place, it is a feeling * being so in the moment, that past is forgotten, future is forgotten. Your wallet and backpack are your signposts * your mum's street, on the way to the underground (subway/metro/ubahn), with your passport and your wallet for of money * you are who you are in that perfect moment, when you are wandering around an airport, on the way to the next place * It can be incredible happiness, but you have your destination figured out. (I wish there was a better word for Liminai, but there we go). There is a book by CS Lewes called the Magician's Nephew. In the book, is a forest with pools, it's called "The Wood Between the Worlds". It's an inbetween place. Natalie, like I wrote at the top of this, I had no idea that the feeling I have had was about something that was known by other people. It's oddly gratifying that other people know about it too. You did a lovely job, as always.

no

anybody came up yet with a great elegant drag name Unheimlich Manoeuvre? anyway it reminded me of some aesthetic philosophy i ve read recently, it was essay on cuteness or something. we've contemplated the beautiful, the sublime and other grand aesthetic feelings a bunch, time to think of the dumpy and the dinky. which then reminded me of a short essay called, iirr, philosophical disenfranchisement of art, positing that what if the original project of philosophy is to deny that art is a kind of philosophy (as a painter i approve of dunking on philosophers on such grounds but dont care if any of that is "true"). fisher's art crit and musings on capitalism tbh always gave me impression of somebody very bamboozled attempting to demystify but mystifying further anyway. i was thinking about surveillance and cringe and evil eye, and in short: have you read or heard of "the book of courtier" (il cortegiano) by baldassare castiglione. it's more or less manual on how to be a courtier and seems to be an interesting text to read with an eye towards cringe, surveillance, natural behaviour that already internalized the defaultness of surveillance etc

Nicola Callahan

Yeah, I think you hit the nail right on liminal spaces in our modern world. Seeing the same franchises in every city in the US is boring, eerie, and depressing. At least a consistent natural landscape changes slightly & varies from place to place. Even the same weather patterns & geographical region will have some element of newness when you travel to it. But McDonalds will look almost exactly the same every time. I don’t think this is just limited to US franchises. Poverty & run down/ abandoned buildings that are pervasive enough in an area just feel more & more liminal the more widespread it is. There’s this feeling that you’re not supposed to stay there. Even if you live there. It’s just supposed to be an eerie place you pass through. Idk, maybe I’m stretching the definition a little too far here!

Conzeit

super fucking liminal

Mackenzie L

You used the legendary PS1 intro!

Nate White

do you think that the use of the word "liminal" is overly broad maybe? like even going back to the OG tumblr post there were examples that didn't seen to fit the definition (like the suburban ponds or whatever)

Madi

Absolutely my favorite tangent you’ve done thus far this is my favorite reading and overall synopsis of the genre. I highly recommend you check out the Silent Hill franchise as it has some of the earliest brilliant usage of liminal spaces and liminal art design in my opinion, I think you would really resonate with a lot of the themes and motifs SH employs in its visuals, audio, and story

Tanner Gore

Fun fact, “limbo” is related to English “limb” through a Proto-IE stem.

Heather Lynne McCloskey

When I think of checkerboard floors, I think of Remedios Varo. She was a surrealist but her art is somehow liminal - people are always traveling and transitioning between places, situations, or states and there's something nostalgic about it all.

Emily E Crawford

I thought a lot about the abandoned mall segment of your opulent video. Are liminal spaces and the stories we tell surrounding them the new Gothic?

FunnyLittleMan

I think theres a lot more to the sonic elements than there is visual when it comes to creating that liminal feeling. not just with the humming of lights but even more so with certain music [almost any song on Aphex Twin's selected ambient works volume II]. my bedroom isn't liminal but it becomes that way when i listen to the serial experiments lain ost. this happens for me even in very crowded spaces, once im immersed in thought and the music i gain a stronger liminal feeling than i do when i look at these images. and i dont think im mistaking it for nostalgia as some of the music that does this to me i have only heard in the past year - also im able to feel the distinction between feeling nostalgic and that liminal feeling. but some of my favourite liminal spaces are when im physically moving from on place to another on public transport alone at night. at the back of the bus with no other passengers on the ride in the middle of some pitch black country side in england. or sitting on a train at night trying to look out the window but only seeing the reflection of the empty seats in front of me because of how much darker it is outside. especially being on the train that transitions from being dim sunset light, where i can see out the window and theres a few passengers, into the pure liminal box i just described.

Igor Moretto

What I believe we see in liminal spaces is the transitory nature of humanity’s presence on the Earth. Hallways, empty streets in the middle of nowhere and, basically, human meddled nature, with its straight lines and utilitarian architecture, make us consider our existence as just a passing reality in time on Earth. It’s not necessarily about human work or architecture, though. I don’t consider the ruins of Athens or the Pyramids to be liminal myself. These are almost like nature to my eyes. It’s modernity, or the recent idea of modernity. And the transitional aspect of it. Basically, liminal art is post-modern. We have spent a lot of time consolidating the idea that humanity is in some way special. Liminal spaces throws the reality, the postmodern reality that we are just one small intrusion into Earth’s (or the Universe’s) history, on our faces.

Deviancy

Watched this in ORD waiting for a delayed flight. Felt very liminal 😂

Isaac_Enver

This was a great video! Speaking of the eerie, one of my favourite painters is the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, his artwork has this eerie surrealist dreamscape feel to it, where sometimes you can sense the abscence despite this full painting of strange creatures and landscapes. My favourite piece of his is this giant portal where the landscape around it is this yellow and orange almost dying world but within the portal is this beautiful blue starlit sky to contrast the warm colours of the wasteland.

Wissa

It’s interesting how you went over cottagecore and other nostalgic constructs in contrast to liminality. Whereas cottage/goblin core is finding some sort of happiness in harmony with a picturesque version of nature, it’s like liminality is the antithesis of nature. There are no seasons, no change, artificiality and without decay. Maybe the tile floor is liminal for the simple reason that they utilize squares, 90 degree angles, pure black and white, something rarely seen in nature but of course not rare in an artificial world. Maybe the reason old arcades and malls and office spaces are purgatory like is because they remind us uncomfortably about some realm, mental or otherwise, where structures which were once filled with flashing colors and noise don’t fully get to “die” or go back to nature, like the human body. Preservation seems to tie into this somehow. Which reminds me of another topic you once spoke about—ancient Roman statues. I know these statues aren’t “spaces” but since we know they used to be painted in bright colors, I wonder if an ancient Roman would feel a similar vibe in seeing the state of them now. Maybe the lack of color gives them a timeless undying feeling that makes us shocked to learn they were once colorful. My mind is drifting so I’ll keep it at that.

Jay

I think this was probably one of the most interesting takes on liminal spaces I’ve seen, love it!

Beezy Queen

sorry if this has already been theorized (but that’s too many comments for me to check), but my thoughts on why the checkerboard floor makes for a good liminal aesthetic has to do with the stark contrast of black on white. a liminal space, the transitory state, could be considered a gray space between two binaries. you stand with the pure white behind you and in front is pure black. this is also a liminal feeling, and aesthetically i can see how this would connect with the checkerboard pattern. also, i really loved this video. that anonymous feeling of being in a place that everyone goes. i really related to most of what you said and it’s nice to know others find comfort in that ambiguity :-) thank you for sharing this rant with us!

Jackson Mancuso

Practicing architect here wanted to throw my thoughts in, granted most of my experience is in entertainment. As far as I know a lot of what we consider liminal spaces and the phenomenon of liminal spaces is mostly an American thing. I think the defining aspect of liminal is a lack of ornamentation, the idea that someone would build a place so desolate and still expect people to function in it. If you look at Europe thinking about hallways and castles or train stations, these areas that could be liminal in the United States have all this great detail that make them a place and welcome to visitor to linger and spend time there. Without the ornamentation of lighting, molding, etc. its a place is so bare you have to look at what other people do to understand what the space is (ex: a mall hallway). To me the horror is why would people build a space not designed for the people who use it, what is the purpose for building a space so desolate and disconnected from the emotions of the people within it…capitalism!

Alexa D

Love this tangent, and loving the tangents in general! Yes and yes.

Narcissa Deville

Perhaps I misunderstood this from the concept of liminal spaces but I thought what made them particularly liminal is like… they feel like what you see in dreams or certain nightmares. I know I’ve had those nightmares where I’m running around an empty airport because someone or some thing is chasing me. Or like an empty house or something like that. So I had always understood that liminal spaces felt almost like something out of a dream/nightmare

Shane Cadden

This explains why Simpsonswave makes me want to cry

Roman

Few of my favorite ”Liminal” media: The Eternal Daughter dir Joanna Hogg, The Under Presents on Oculus Quest, Steven Universe season 1, episode 19 Rose’s Room.

Samblix

Just about to watch. I love listening/watching while I work from home. It's totally ok for the production value etc to be lower on the videos. We have the main channel for those. Keep up the amazing work!

lauren lopez

the spongebob episode ruined my life for years. Im 22yo and had a... liminal period on my life. i finally figure out what happened and how it affected me, and why i feel so deamn bad seeing backrooms images. For years my dreams were: me on a empy dark road, without a phone, no cars at sight, far far far away from home, completly alone and,,, quiet? a very quiet anxiety, literally like the spongebob episode. thank you, this made me understand a lot of things.

Kamil Piwowarczyk

Loved this video and topic! I've always gravitated toward art in that style. Does more macabre and surreal variants of whole dream like landscapes also can be liminal? I'm thinking about Beksiński...

Alina

I’m so glad I subbed to your patreon. I loved this tangent.

Aristana Scourtas

this is great, I love how your videos make me think of so many connected things -- nostalgia plus vaporwave plus leftism plus liminal spaces. My mind always feels galaxy-brained after your videos

Aristana Scourtas

I guess that would also go along with "the uncanny" and the repeating twins, spaces, etc

Willow Germs

there's something about this type of architecture creating separation from nature, therefore taking us out of our context of other living beings...who also help indicate to us that things are safe by making their little noises and hanging out around you, unless there is danger. our buildings decontextualize us from the alive world. these are lifeless places, not just no humans, but no animals and no ecosystem, and they are static and therefore dead. I think that's why cottage-core definitely doesn't fit in this liminal category because it represents a longing for a time when we were connected with nature, and evokes purity...it's the pagan to radical-right pipeline. Really loved this topic, watched it over two days and would love more abstract/aesthetic topics like this in the future. Thank you, Natalie!

Tyler Ray

Gay tangent everyone gay tangent!!! 🔔 🔔🔔

George Clutterbuck

Would a sub-set of the liminal space be images of storage facilities, warehouses, even pantries? (I'm thinking of Khloé K's pantry in particular here) I don't know how that would figure with the definition of the eerie—is there an eerieness to these spaces seeming endless? The absent end, the endless present? Kelly Prendergast has written on Khloé's pantry for Dilettante Army, 'Merchandizing the Void'. It feels super fucking liminal, gorge ❤️

Mac

I'm not a very online person so none of this made any sense to me.

Ann C

Early in the pandemic, during the first lockdown, I occasionally went to work in person because the school where I worked was allowed to stay partially open. Driving to work on I-95 on those bleak March mornings was a surreal experience. The ordinarily busy highway was deserted; I usually saw only one or two other cars in my 12-mile commute. Campus was empty. Students were gone, and most buildings were locked and dark. It was like going into the office on a weekend. Eventually, I got used to it and even enjoyed the silence. The eeriness faded once we started using Zoom, with its cozy peeks into other people’s rooms, but I still appreciated the quiet.

Bara

I had a vague idea of what a liminal space was, but watching this tangent so many experiences are coming to my mind under this umbrella: The abandoned Holiday Inn on Jensen Beach, in Florida. So eerie to come upon while walking on perfectly ordinary beach. Moving to a new place and running into people who are "alternate reality" versions of people I knew previously, and having them occupy the same space in my mind. The time I arrived after midnight at my parent's new house, in a new golf community when they were away for the weekend. All the furnishings were of course the same as their previous house, and the house and community itself was nearly identical to where they'd lived before, and everything was so neat and impersonal it looked like a model house. I was kind of freaking out until a found a damp sponge under the sink. Erik Satie's Gymnopedies No. 1.

Turkka Inkilä

This reminded me of a passage by Walter Benjamin. He described the photographs of Paris taken by Eugène Atget (1857 – 1927) to evoke a feeling as if they were scenes of crimes. Could those be considered liminal?

S C

Just watched Contra's tangent on liminal spaces and I am still wrapping my head around it. I love how her videos make me identify feeling, sensations or impressions I've had, put them into words and dive much deeper into them to connect them to many other themes. Mark Fisher's quote on capital acting like this force that shapes our surroundings and make them uncanny (through the mass production architectural repetition and other aspects) and manifests in these feelings of loneliness, a place that should feels like home but isn't, a promised future of prosperity that never came to be, that blew my mind. Mostly, the idea of the eeriness and unsettlingness akin to a horror story in which the monster is capital as the force that shapes socio economic relations and pushes us to work to death and destroy our natural environment.

S C

I highly recommend this video (it's in Spanish but you can put subtitles) about the millennial LoFi aesthetic. https://youtu.be/WUnCaHYgmJc

Sadie Rae

i fucking love this. just watched for the second time.

Alison Banks

I really like SolarPunk as an aesthetic imagining of a hopeful future. I loved this video, thank you!

kballard13999

Natalie, you’re such a gem. Wow.

Buddha

This put into words what I have have been abstractly thinking about for years as a photographer of liminal-ish scenery and as a fellow cynical millennial. Wonderfully done video essay, a Tangent that rivals regular Contrapoints content. I don't think this needed extra stuff added to it; the numerous examples of liminal art sufficed.

Jessica in LA

Wow! I never regret being a Patreon supporter, this is so great. I saw the title of the video and wasn’t sure if I’d connect with the topic, but you ended up addressing so many of the biggest topics on my mind right now - I’m currently reading a book about the afrofuturist jazz musician Sun-Ra, which along with this video has made me think a lot about the power of utopian visions. I love the production value and depth of your main channel videos and they’re always worth the wait, but I get just as excited for these ones!

Lumiel

And here I was waiting for Contra to notice the checkerboard floor in the Macintosh Plus album art.

Peter Tan

I loved this video! I basically became a member just so I could watch it. I learned about liminal spaces about a year or two ago and it was a revelation to me. Just like you said it, finally someone had put a structure on a feeling I’ve had for such a long time. My personal experience with liminal spaces is more related to the uncanny or eerie sections of your essay. Rationalizing things years after they happen can be tricky, but the way I articulate my relationship with liminal spaces is that they are probably related to a melancholy I maybe felt at the end of fun days I had when I was a kid. I personally relate a lot to the pictures of empty playgrounds, pools etc, and I imagine it’s because I felt lonely/down when the fun was over and I had to go back home everyone else had already left whatever event I was in. I also experience this with old 3D games (there are even YouTube essays on why Super Mario 64 feels scary, which how I learned about liminal spaces to begin with). When I was “done” playing a game but still had it on, I would just use the camera to look around. Game design I think necessarily create liminal spaces because the player is not supposed to be analyzing every single corner of a stage. They need to complete an objective and move on. But when I stared at those stages with janky low-polygon 3D graphics, I’d notice how empty and frankly lonely those places were. Liminal spaces don’t give me any sort of warm nostalgic feeling. There’s probably some nostalgia involved, but it’s more melancholic. It’s weird, because once in a while these scenes just pop up in my head. I’m not sure I understand much more than before where they come from inside me, but at least I can name it and explore it. Anyway, I loved this essay. Thanks for making this video!

Mary Thompson

Awesome! Thank you for putting into words what I feel.

Rachel Muir

Noting that all liminal spaces in natural settings have some human structure in the image -- a lamp post, a roadway, a trail. A human object is necessary in order to sign that humans are missing. Otherwise it does evoke the emotions associated with liminal spaces. Ansel Adams wilderness photography has no liminal qualities.

Pidge

you may be unsurprised to find that she addresses this exact impression/popular complaint in the video

Jake Callahan

Looooved this one! Especially the nostalgia segment. Lately I’ve been yearning hard for my childhood, but it’s interesting (and sad) to hear how nostalgia is used by reactionaries. I guess part of what keeps my feet on the ground is realizing that there wasn’t any specific thing in the world that made my childhood good. It’s just that it’s my childhood. We often look at past experiences with rose-tinted glasses. In my memories it’s always sunny, the schoolday was fun and I’m visiting a friend and we’re in good spirits and the family is happy. But I know that wasn’t the case everyday. My brain has just chosen to remember all the good in an idealized day, instead of remembering all the times it was gray, I was bored, wished I was older etc etc. Anyway, thanks for this one!

Boris Vorobev

Yes! Was hoping for a mention of The Langoliers - perhaps the most on-the-nose depiction of liminal spaces in film/TV.

Boris Vorobev

Well, I grew up in Russia outside of major metropolitan centers. The "Soviet liminal aesthetic" certainly does something for me. There's a large number of places in Russia that are just kind of... drying up gradually. Anyone who can move to bigger cities does, especially young people. Obviously there are very few actually empty cities, but the feeling is there. Also, the photos are not meant to depict the reality *as you experience it*. The whole idea is that they depict real places in a surreal way.

Spheres with handles

Great video as always! One thing though, what is the name of the song playing around 35:08?

Teed Rockwell

P.S. I don't think you need to worry about giving us patrons something "extra for our money". The whole point of patronage is that we are supporting something that benefits the common good, not just us. And your videos definitely do that.

Aurelian

This was a great discussion, both of the liminal aesthetic and of its interplay with nostalgia. The common obsession with nostalgia that seems ever-present in American culture right now has been really frustrating for me. But your idea (and Fisher's) that we're experiencing such intense nostalgia because we're simultaneously giving up on the concept of a brighter future puts the phenomenon into a new perspective for me. I definitely appreciate that. I suspect that periods of cultural nostalgia are normal for humanity. I think there must always be periods of rest in between periods of rapid advancement/innovation. And the natural whiplash to such periods is nostalgia. Setting all that aside, I would love to see you tackle the interplay of cottagecore, Victorian pastoralism, climate change, and anti-capitalist sentiment. I think there's a really rich depth where all of those ideas interact in the social subconscious right now.

David Camara

I could tell how passionate you felt about this tangent compared to the last few but maybe I’m just being a little parasocial in my observation. Anyways this was great, thanks Natalie 💚

Audrey

Maybe the checkerboard floor is liminal because it’s “timeless” in a way, like we don’t associate it with any time period. And also because it exaggerates the length of a room when shown in perspective? Such an interesting point!

Stephen Smith

Oh my god, thank you for your comments at about the hour mark. Years ago, I was working in China and used to drive past mile after mile after mile of empty apartment blocks at twilight. Each one the same, each one completely dark - it was one of the most eerie experiences of my life but I never really understood why until now.

Derick Gadd

Checkerboard floors.. they tend to only work in large empty spaces, right? That's why you put them in, to break up such a space. Like if you are designing a space expecting it to have furniture everywhere or something, you don't put in a checkerboard floor. You also wouldn't do it in a fully utilitarian place, like a warehouse. So it's somewhere that is designed with being seen while empty in mind, which is still making an effort to appeal to the viewer.

Pauline Barry-Venture

What liminal makes me think of is this kinda well known (at least for semi-chronically online people such as myself) piece of music by Haruomi Hosono, called "Watering a flower". He created it in 1984 to play in MUJI stores, and it is the definition of liminal to me. The comment section is pretty incredible too. Link: https://youtu.be/34UutDrXV2Q

Toph Bostic

I feel like the black and white tile floors are liminal because they remind me of the most simplistic, epitomized representation of liminality. Black and white being extremes of each other and the blending of the two being that transitory state between extremes.

Jo Quigley

I instantly pegged I'm Thinking of Ending Things as being a trans allegory. Hard to say why without spoiling it though, but I watched it while still in the closet and it really resonated on that level.

ProfessorWham

As someone originally from Kansas--the entire fucking state is liminal--although one has to survive the "flattening" to truly appreciate it. Problem is, one cannot really see that until it is escaped. Wichita and Topeka are the best examples of cities that exist solely as liminal spaces. Limbo--middle ground--the sky and I-70 existing as portals getting the hell out of there.

Trevor

Such a fantastic video!! Wish this was on the main channel, just so it could get a larger audience.

LogKaiEro

Carol's comment about Kansas triggered a memory for me: I once took a road trip through Nebraska, and it was the eeriest experience of my life. And now I have some vocabulary to talk about it! Driving on 1-80: Mile after mile, As far as I could see were fields of corn (repetitive, uncanny). The corn was so tall and dense there could be a very large object (or being) 10' away, and I would never know until it emerged from the corn (What is thalassophobia for corn? Because I have that.) And then at one point, we drove under this brightly painted archway that had the characters from the Wizard of Oz on it. It was surreal and eerie--like who came out here in the middle of nowhere (there were no visible towns on the horizon) to paint this bridge? All along this stretch of highway, I felt this odd exhilitation and foreboding about the idea of stopping here, next to the corn fields, where there was no reason to stop, where there was no visible human presence...and yet the fields of corn indicated that clearly there were agents shaping the landscape. My mind lingered on the place that wasn't designed to be lingered on. Maybe industrial-sized farms along the highways are the backrooms of capitalism-- the normally hidden-away underbelly of our globalized world, which is so big they feel like you could get lost there forever. (Followup: backrooms for who? Not the people who farm or live in the area.) tl;dr corn is frightening; highways are liminal; capitalism delenda est.

Hark a Harold

My guess is that checkerboard is a form of absolute order that hints at its absolute dissolution. The total regularity so unnaturally eliminates the chaotic and irregular that in some way we are constantly reminded of the omission of this natural element in the scenery of our daily lives.

EllieBerry

There is a United airlines flight that leaves Denver at midnight and lands in Newerk at around 5:30 in the morning and I swear it’s the ultimate liminal space experience. Every bit of it just gives the liminal space vibes

Cookiontu

haruomi hosono is the most liminal shit ever!!

Cozzy

I absolutely loved this one! Liminal spaces have always been such a fascinating topic to me. I really liked the part where you described liminal spaces as 'resisting verbal description', which I absolutely agree with. I feel like liminality in general is an exploration of the more nuanced emotions that sit between the extremes (i.e. happy, sad, etc.). Also I remember in your 'opulence' video you talked about a new 'gothic aesthetic' which I think liminal spaces definitely exemplify. It's our relatable way of understanding decay. When we see a haunted castle, I guess we find it romantic because it reminisces times of old. but an abandoned playground hits close to home enough for us to feel something else. Great video in general and looking forward for your next one! Also about checkerboard tiling. My 2 cents is that it includes a lot of the elements that we associate with liminal spaces: 1. Repetition - the almost oppressive repetition of the pattern induces this almost hypnotic quality to the design. 2. Placement - because it is literally beneath you, I feel like this pattern turns into 'portals almost'. You have the black tiles which can very well be holes in the ground that might take you somewhere else. 3. Unnatural contrasts - The colour scheme itself is very oppressive and at direct extremes of contrast. Especially in movies, those tiles are polished to an unnatural level, which makes them feel earie. 4. Symbolism - The pattern can also remind us of chess or that we are being played like ones when we walk them. Also there's some yin-yang vibes going on which I guess can also add to this.

Wesley Bryon

I personally think that there are things that are liminal to some and not to others. And I oftentimes think this is where a distrust of trans people springs from in those that are unfamiliar with trans people. Someone who is not entirely passing one way or the other escapes the set archetypes of gender that some people have grown used to as defining factors. I have experienced this with young children who up until now have only grown familiar with their binary parents, oftentimes they will see me as not exactly scary but are weirded out by me. This strangeness has been resolved by me or another trans woman talking to them in a gentle manner, generally since kids have not developed a set of standards they hold fast to, they are quick to understand and trust someone if the initial interaction is positive and safe, they don't have to perform the socio-political gymnastics that certain adults feel like they have to in order to "get" something as simple as pronouns. At the point of a child or even an open minded adult interacts with a trans person in a mannerly and comfortable fashion, usually their perception of transness gets pulled out of the liminal and becomes easy to wrap their head around.

Deconstruction Interactive

This is a beautiful video :) Love the exploration of the liminal and all the releated concepts!

Kyle Hass

when you said "jet bridges" I full on thought you were trying to claim Jeff Bridges is a liminal space and I was like, fair

Kit Eginton

My two cents on the checkerboard floor: they're used in liminal imagery for the same reason checkerboard patterns are used as an illustration of spacetime or non-Euclidean geometries—because their grid layout makes us think of space, not place. They feel like walking across an abstract structure (like a chess game or a coordinate grid). They suggest that place might dissolve from underneath our feet, leaving only infinite space and perspective, an anywhere without a somewhere. They also look like they could repeat infinitely, and repetition is uncanny.

Sophie

When I was 5 years old, I used to have these nightmares about liminal spaces. I was trapped alone in the showers in my town's swimming pool at night. Or I was trapped in a room in an empty pink corridor underground and had the feeling that no-one would come and look for me. Shortly after this nightmare I went to a shopping mall with my family and the bathrooms turned out to at the end of this underground, pink, tiled corridor that went on forever. It didn't freak me out but I felt like my nightmares carried a sense of truth in them - that the world can be a very hostile place to children, the fear of abandonment. Still today, I continue to have liminal dreams. I think it is a image for the fundamental loneliness that is just part of the human condition, the universe's indifference towards our human sorrows, that everything that humans built will decay and be forgotten ultimately.

Elise Azam

Natalie explained why the checkerboard would be considered the ultimate "liminal" motif in her video, she answered her own question. It's explicitly man made, geometric, and artificial in the simplest, most recognizable way.

Brianna MacNeill

I recently watched Wendigoons video essay on the ARG The Backrooms, that focuses on the liminal nature of the series He said something interesting about liminal spaces are areas of human construction, kept in well maintained condition, but lack the humans themselves in the space. And the eeriness we pick on the emptiness I wonder if the chess board evokes that in a similar concept as it lacking the pieces of the queens, kings, pons etc. That it evokes a on emptiness without the pieces. As other liminal spaces evoke without people

Chris Godwin

Speaking of David Lynch, Twin Peaks might be the most liminal TV show ever made. The entire series is about the in-between space of a small town transitioning from innocent Americana to supernatural corruption and evil. Remember that weird zigzag variation on the checkerboard floor from the Red Room?

Adam Finch

An interesting observation I learned in a film studies course was how liminal spaces are often used in film to represent a fragmented, disconnected, individualistic culture. A lot of Chinese films will never have a liminal scene when depicting China (whether its an objectively positive or negative statement on China itself) and will almost always try to create a liminal feeling when depicting Japan (while having an overtly positive statement about Japan within the text). The effect is that no matter how bad conditions get in China the culture is always uplifting and preferable, while no matter how good conditions are elsewhere they are devoid of meaning or soul, due to that lack of social connection.

Kath L.

I think the checkerboard floors are liminal because they make the transitions between the Euclidean and non-Eucledian more apparent, especially as reality gets warped in the rabbit hole sequence. Additionally, they draw attention to the rules of the ordinary world, where we move like chess figures according to our identity, right at the threshold of the world where these rules are about to be bent, redefined, or thrown away altogether.

Andrew May

That long pause after the question followed by, "It'ssuperfuckingliminal". You make me happy. Thanks for that!

sunlit_music

Thanks very much for this brilliant video. I really appreciate how you mentioned what makes a place liminal, and your comment on how hope is about looking forward whereas nostalgia is about looking back. You're right about how liminal spaces can be freeing - they can be unsettling because they exist without context, but at the same time, they're an escape from daily life.

Isla View

Natalie, your mind is so fuckin cool.

Vitória Xavier

I've always felt the "liminal" but I used to recognize it as "the matrix is breathing" and adress this feeling to the moment and to the situation and not to the place itself. The place where I felt the liminal the most was at the underground of the hospital I was an engineering intern at. The underground of the hospital used to place the ducts, the equipments, the laundry and most things that "runs" a hospital and we often don't think about it. So this specific liminal space used to hit harder because I felt I was seeing beyond everytime I walked those loooong hallways.

Reese w

I'm 30 minutes in, and it's clear this liminal video and the psychedelic video should have been combined. They are literally the same thing

Renfield

lotf's art made me wanna die a lil

Andrew May

The checkerboard floor is liminal because of optical illusion? Part of us knows it’s a solid floor, but the high contrast maybe tricks the brain into think what we’re standing on isn’t solid. Rabbit hole-like: you could fall through to somewhere else? Not sure. just woke from falling asleep to this with this profound realization.

Andrew May

and I can see in the YouTube comments that this has been covered thoroughly. Ha!

Pdlp

checkerboard acts like a wireframe that makes more 'graspable' the true size and expanse of the space you're inhabiting in relation to you, so you become more self-aware of your existence in the strange place. It's also associated with the timeless classical style making the experience more transcendental.

Ruby Ramsden

Natalie, I think you would like the poem Transubstantiation by Molly McCully Brown. Very liminal imo

L

i wonder if checkerboard shows up so much in liminal imagery because it itself can be a liminal space. architecture, drawings/paintings, web design etc use grids (checkerboard) at least at the early stages of creating something. they are man-made to provide a context and guide. maybe seeing them out of context, "empty," and adjacent to natural imagery adds to that uncanny feeling? (ps lovedddd this tangent)

TheNickestNick

Does anyone else like airport terminals? I will purposefully book flights that have long connections because I like the feeling of hanging out in airport terminals.

Rachel Bayston

1: If you wanted to combine the liminal and the psychedelic, wouldn't Hunter Thompson's good stuff (Kentucky Derby, Las Vegas) be more or less exactly where they meet and get hideously sutured together? 2: On capital: Cory Doctorow talks about corporations as a form of malevolent nonhuman intelligence: literally a slow-motion general AI tasked with turning everything they touch into capital (nothing?).

MoSH

Hm, I never thought of "heimlich" as "homely" although it sounds a lot like "heimelig" which means home(l)y. Heimlich is in secret, im Geheimen. Why un-secretly means uncanny, I don't know.

Angelica

Loved this. I want to say though, I think that perhaps people who work and exist within liminal spaces (I am a trauma/surgical nightshift nurse at a big hospital) emotionally experience liminal spaces differently. When I was younger I romanticized them (i.e. getting drunk on empty playgrounds in my late teens, photography projects of cracks in sidewalks), now when I see liminal imagery I feel a sense of personal boredom with it, as well as a sense of someone else’s depression and emptiness; a general disinterest, a desire to turn away from it to enter into instead into a space of lurid plants and moisture. Not sure what the deeper why is underneath that, but something I’d love your perspective on if you ever have another Liminal Spaces video project.

Sebastián

I loved this tangent. You make every topic fascinating and captivating. Keep being amazing ❤️

Tsvetina Ilieva

Being John Malkovich. This video threw some light on why I feel this undescribable yearning when watching it. Pleasurable and terryfying. Thank you!

lester carpay

For me the liminal feeling of a checkerboard pattern has to do with its association with chess (and checkers). The nostalgic is put in an unhomely context. The chessboard is depopulated and the warm wood is replaced with the coldness of an empty granite hallway. This is perhaps related to the snail and the mushroom in the dark empty pool, the organic is given a warm, happy appearance (uncanny) but are placed in a cold, eerie context. The checkerboard pattern is made even more liminal when it is extended beyond the normal size of a chessboard, giving it an endless, transitory quality. What space exists beyond the boundary of the chessboard, outside the level of a game? This could again be related to the idea of clipping out of reality to get into the Backrooms.

lester carpay

I also find the beach an interesting place to mention in this context as a, by definition, transitional space between that people do spend time in for the sake of the space itself. Many people enjoy the beach especially because of its liminal quality.

Frankie

I keep coming back to this tangent to fall asleep to. Love it so much. Relaxing to hear about liminal spaces while cozy in bed

Adrian Coburn

checkerboard=European/American yin yang?

Will

I think the checkerboard floor ends up being liminal because Masonic temples (at least where I grew up) were often the 'town event hall'. Like, the one in my town would have pancake breakfasts, they did those finger print collection events for missing children, would sometimes host boyscout events. etc. So you ended up spending a lot of time in them as a child. Hence the nostalgia factor/why they become liminal when empty

Kia Nicole Tudor

I think the checkerboard thing is a probably a twist on a twist. So, like, in the past checkerboard floors were fancy because making things white was really hard and they probably wanted the black to contrast with the white to illustrate how white the white tiles were, not to mention how straight cut everything has to be to make a checker board pattern, which was probably hard to do before industrialization. So then you have this connotation of checkerboard floors=fancy, So then somebody is like, "What if the fancy checkerboard floor in the nice mansion was grimy and dirty to emphasize how weird this is that something so nice is now abandoned?" So then you have these movies and pictures meant to evoke an eerie idea, like a secret mansion nobody knows about, probably the precursor to liminal, and then people start taking these eerie pieces of media as their reference point, not knowing why the checkerboard floor was originally such a thing, and now the checkerboard floor in their mind is just "eerie" and therefore essential to a forgotten and lonely place. Just a hot take, please don't stab me if I'm wrong.

Gregg D.

On the topic of liminal space horror, it can certainly qualify as horror. The unease and sense of being lost is the thing, not some spooky monster chasing you. Hallways that go on forever, labyrinthine cities of faceless people, driving around a suburb of cul de sacs and 3 way stops that all send you back to other cul de sacs. The podcast The Magnus Archives explores this kind of horror in several episodes quite effectively but again it’s different from a spooky monster. It’s not adrenaline based, it’s a slowly growing anxiety. It’s a stress dream about being stuck at work at 2am trying to finish an insurmountable task while all your friends are winding down their Halloween parties that you missed. Edit: I spoke a bit too soon because your later examples basically cover this, but I also wanted to add the movie Skinamarink is super fucking liminal.

Marc-Olivier Gagné

It never occurred to me that the eerie and weird feeling of going through the Minecraft wold I made with my brothers when I was younger had more to it than plain nostalgia. We built villages, towers, castles, prisons and metros. All of these places are supposed to house and be used by people, but there's no one. Just looping ambience music and me. (Also it's checkerboard heaven since it's Minecraft)

Ish The Dark Lotus

I think you summed it up with "Dark Nostalgia" - which honestly feels like a missed opportunity for the name. I also think it somehow relates to childhood anxieties as well. Like looking at an endless hallway in a hotel room can trigger memories of going on a vacation as a child and getting separated from your parent in an unfamiliar territory. Thank for you this topic, sometimes it is good to take a breather from the political sh!tshow and touch other more chill topics.

Ish The Dark Lotus

Great point. I also think it somehow relates to childhood anxieties as well. Like looking at an endless hallway in a hotel room can trigger memories of going on a vacation as a child and getting lost and separated from your parent, same with an abandoned malls or supermarkets.

Ish The Dark Lotus

I think the checkerboard floor is a connection to board-games like chess or checkers, or a crossword puzzle, where we, as people feel small and reduced to pawns in a game. Plus, checker boards are associated with optical illusions as well, especially when crooked or at odd angles, giving rise to the unsettling feeling. (See the Cabinet of Dr Caligari for triangular patterns used to create an illusion of "bending space")

Ish The Dark Lotus

Agree, also feeling like a gameboard pawn yourself and thus "in the matrix". They are also used in optical illusions and magic tricks, thereby being a symbolic representations of "Things are not as they seem."

Julia

I was dying to watch this video!! All the themes mentioned had been part of my research during my undergrad studies, and will possibly be in my postgrad too. The checkerboard floor thing for me is what you mention later in the video about recursion when dealing with the unheimlich. It's the same thing throughout a lot (but not all) internet liminal images besides the feeling of usage/abandonment, eerieness, etc. Recursiveness is a way to "visualize" infinity through the repetition of basic elements/units. And the uneasy feeling of the liminal, which is the threshold or the space in-between spaces, for me, is similar to the feeling of eternity. Which in that time itself has stopped in a single position, which repeats itself in infinite space (?) I'm also glad there's a soviet and a polish side of the aesthetic. Something I always found a bit disappointing is that most visual memories in liminal spaces are mostly north american experiences, although they also instill similar feelings. Maybe there's a latin american liminal subreddit somewhere?

Tristan

J'adore votre travail et cette vidéo est particulièrement touchante. Courage pour continuer à créer votre propre vie, avec le vertige qui va avec, le décrochage ressenti face au cours du monde. Vous êtes admirable

Tasha 3D

Apologies if this has been mentioned before, but in case it hasn't- checkerboard textures are super common in the history of computer graphics. Easy to render floor plane. No surprise it would be burned into our collective consciousness of nostalgic game / animation graphics.

Adam kastin

I worked in the basement at a hotel for 3 years overnight in Manhattan. Things got fucking weeeeiiiird

Yasemin Elrabaa

My partner had a radio show in college called ~the space between~ we really enjoyed this tangent

SpookyCloud

As an argument against those who describe liminal spaces as “just creepy,” or what have you, I would argue that they’re just left of creepy. If creepy were on one point of a circle and cozy on the other, liminal would be just a few degrees off from creepy. It reminds me of those sounds that seem like they’re constantly rising in pitch. It’s the uncertainty of whether something is about to happen or has just happened. The odd stillness after an emergency comes to mind. Or the feeling of not knowing what to do with our hands. Or maybe I’m just on my own tangent now.

Kapelski

This is the best tangent so far

Asche Helling

I've been thinking on this tangent again as I consider the homeless people in my city, who often occupy train stations, traffic intersections, and other liminal spaces while they attempt to receive kindness from strangers. The time-bending nature of liminality has me wondering what their experience is really like. For passers by, that impoverished person is a blink in their day. But for that impoverished person, the liminality and perpetual flow of passers by is... their consistent reality. It has me wanting to bring a cup of coffee to someone in that position and ask them about their experience of their life.

ouijacorn

Having watched this tangent twice now, I've noticed that I don't have much of a reaction to images that are deliberately targeting my nostalgia (abandoned Toys R Us etc), but I do feel something when I see images of hospital corridors and waiting rooms. I've also noticed that a lot of other chronically ill or disabled people feel a sense of comfort from hospitalcore or medcore photography, which often overlaps with the liminal aesthetic. Maybe it's because the hallways of one hospital are like those of any other hospital and are instantly familiar to people who have spent a lot of time in them.

Natalija Paunic

Hi Natalie! I loved this video 🤍. I'm wondering if you've read Marc Auge's Non-places (I presume you have, cause you did use this term once in the video I think). It's interesting how he speaks a bit differently about this topic himself, as far as I remember... I was just curious about your thoughts on that. X

Sarrasinae

This is probably my favourite video you have ever done. Thank you.

Bibi

Could the checkerboard thing just be because it's like a chessboard, so it suggests you are within a game rather than the real world?

Bibi

also maybe that its a confluence of two places/ sides/ states - the black and white squares - which could also be seen as liminal?

Dylan Glynn

OK not fully through this tangent yet (loving it though!) Moved to comment for the first time, mid video, at your mention of the checker board floor. Literally as I'm watching/listening to this video I'm working away at concept art for my next animated short. Specifically, concept art for a sequence in a bath house, where the main character moves through the hallways of the bathhouse and the visual effect is a kaleidoscopic combination of a mirror maze of hotel hallways! with A CHECKERBOARD FLOOR. OK! so why am I writing this other than to self promote what i'm up to lol. I'm writing to propose WHY the checkerboard floor. This is a design decision I made intuitively, knowing that it would be dynamic to animate. That said, I think that still points at why many, including yourself in Sims, gravitate towards this choice. The black and white tile, design wise, in an of itself is representative of this perhaps core liminal concept of melding seemingly contradictory concepts of stillness and movement. A black and white tile floor in and of itself is not moving, but the harshness of the contrast A)Vibrate against one another in a trippy way. This idea (from what I remember) is an core principal of Optical Art. So, first of all there’s already the inherrent idea about the optical illusion of vibration/movement from the checker pattern. B) This pattern has movement because the alternation creates a visual rhythm, akin synaesthetically to the way a the repetition of clapping creates a beat, a metronome creating the basis for music. End tangent lol.

Kit Lost

Faking having a job for 8 hours a day is absolute bonkers!

Amos

I watched this video before and after a nap and now I feel very weird.

Saoirse

I'm charmed by your description of having invented, but ultimately failed to adequately put to words the experience of liminal spaces at the time. The fact you were doing this while faking having a job for 8 hours a day in the tunnels beneath the Library of Congress is merely the artistic flourish, the coloratura of the story.

Saoirse

I enjoy hearing your artistic regrets. It simultaneously gives me the imaginative stimulus of the reality where you did create it, and how the culture might have changed; and it encourages me to pursue my own artistic impulses.

Saoirse

I feel like the checkerboard floor could simply be an uneasy juxtaposition of light and dark together, showing two sides of a threshold. Making explicit the binary.

Saoirse

Wow! I never noticed how liminal spirited away is

Saoirse

Hearing Natalie make main channel Contrapoints references feels very meta somehow

Saoirse

This reminds me of the very liminal novel The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec, which is almost entirely set in a vast, mostly empty hotel. The text itself has no chapter or section markings; the whole thing is transitional, not quite graspable or permanent. It's beautiful, if dreamy to the point where your mind slides off it.

Jessie Lees

The liminal spaces paper! Finally a paper I've read! We got to my specialty!I love fog and snow, but I definitely have a fear of ocean depths. I thrive outside in the winter and foggy conditions because I feel like I'm the powerful predatory creature, maybe for being able to survive in that space. But, in video games I am always sweating when I have a character swimming in an ocean and there could be a monstrous creature coming to eat my character.

Jessie Lees

The back rooms thing where you mention a Spongebob episode of being lost after missing the bus is a reoccurring nightmare/bad dream that I have. I miss a bus and can't get home and it's too cold to sleep outside and I'll miss work and lose my job if I can't get there tomorrow. Or my mom and I missing an expensive flight for a vacation and then we miss out on something super expensive that we had been looking forward to. The sheer panic. I fill the empty space (not knowing what will happen) with more emptiness in my dream life (loss of home and other basic needs).

Amos

I'd love to know what the soundtrack is. It's so fucking liminal.

Clara

I always interpreted checkerboard floors as another sign of the in-between, not quite white and not quite black, but also not grey as in a mixture of both. Rather something suggesting both there here (white) and there (black), without being either, but still leaving enough of a trace of both for them to be noticed.

Bob the Fish Productions

Oh, so that's what the feeling was called when I wandered around my school at 9:00 at night while attempting to rehearse an A-Level Drama project

Ida Duvnjak

Limbo and purgatory are not the same thing in Catholic teology. However they are both liminal spaces.

Paola Nicoll Alzuru Castillo

hiii, so, this thing reminds me of some literature like Cortazar, maybe you've heard about him along with Borges (but Cortazar expands more on what I'm trying to state here). This novel of Cortazar, "Rayuela" (Hopscotch) or a short story like "El perseguidor" (The Pursuer), seems to me is all about finding some liminality and strangeness in all the places and experiences, kinda like living in an organic state of highness???, or like living in blank, like you said about the liminal space not being based on ur identity. If you haven't read those stories, I highly recommend them ("El perseguidor" mostly cuz is shorter; in this one there's a dialogue pretty interesting about shape of time (?. About the nostalgia and the right wing thing, here in Venezuela I sense something like that with a sort of artistic wave of remembering icons from before the chavismo and madurismo came, in other words, 80's and 90's Venezuela (there's people that go further and remember 70's and 60's). For my generation it's kinda odd, cuz as a person who was born on 2000 (the second year of the first period of Chavez), those icons are not that foundational to our idea of country. Actually, to my generation the idea of Venezuela is pretty broken, but there's some superficial discourse about to find pride in certain things for not to think in the absence that narcocommunism has brought to this land... there's many things to unpack there. Hopefully someday we can chat about this. Thanksthanks for this, binge watching your tangents has inspired to keep going with my thesis.

Sappho's Friend

yeah, limbo is seen as a place/state of being where nor punishment nor salvation is administered, and purgatory was added later in the middle ages as a place that cleanses people of sin through punishment. The catholic church popularised the idea of purgatory in the high-late middle ages to convince rich folks that they can purchase salvation (theyd live murderous and overall callous lives, and then just pay a fortune of gold for masses to be held in their name, to supposedly shorten their time in purgatory). PS are you croatian/Bosnian/serbian? uncommon to see folk from my region here

Alyssa Favreau

Absolutely. I think it also highlights depth and distance in a way that solid flooring can't. You get a sense of scale that hints at the sublime. You can't ignore the infinite when something as substantial and ordered as a checkerboard continues onward without end. And the unease comes from the paradox of having something as basic and man-made as alternating black and white squares (or the equivalent, see Lynch's Black Lodge) occupying such a vast, inhuman space. Edit: Always finish the video before commenting.

Lily Sovacole

When you're writing a thesis on Rayuela by Cortazar (among other books), try to get a break by looking into old Contrapoint Tangent, and get to this comment... Hi there! :) Hope the video will inspire me to keep going as well :)

Jen

Just watched all of us strangers and in my heartache needed to watch the other gay video on liminal spaces. 😢

Amelie C

this is pretty old but I did write a (shit) analysis paper for my English class like two years ago about Disco Elysium after skimming Fisher's Hauntology, Derrida's Ghosts of Marx, and watching Hypernormalization so its nice to have some (quite limited) background knowledge on something Contra is talking about. I wrote a bit of my introduction about how that trend of "russian doomer" music from like early 2020ish arose from these circumstances of state decay, maybe as sort of black swan to the music of the vaporwave era which reflects the promises of 1980s liberal capitalism.

Ariadne Marinoy

I think, I guess in a metaphysical sense (?), capitalism could be considered liminal, or at least the American Dream. There is a liminal aspect in the ''promise''' of it, the rags to riches storyline. It is a layer that, I think, is subconsciously recognized when we see abandoned workspaces or malls. People built these structures to host capital transactions or work towards them. When it comes to the nostalgia mentioned in the ads. as you said, people didn't recognize the failure of capitalism, it wasn't as saturated in the day to day life as it is today. Therefore, maybe it's the disappointment from said promise, that leads people to yearn for the state innocence/ignorance that allowed them to believe in it.

Ida Duvnjak

Haha yess I’m from Croatia. I studied philosophy so I really enjoy the content. My brother reccomended the chanel to me so I guess she is also popular in our region 😊😊

Dcat217 - Danielle

I find liminal spaces comforting (and sometimes disturbing) because they're places where time pressure disappears and I can daydream. While waiting for Godot, one can think about things.

Dcat217 - Danielle

Checkerboard patterning was used in Renaissance art to define a precise 3-dimensional perspective, changing up from medieval art which was floaty and spiritual with its ill-defined spaces. It might have to do with defining space in a way that subverts the grounding and reality-imposing aspects it normally offer would in perspective composition. Instead of making us feel grounded in reality, the repeating patterns and layouts (in the Matrix, or warped in Alice) of checkboard confuses our sense of space and sensible architecture. And as you mentioned there's a component of the uncanny that's found in the mechanistic repetition of things. I think in general too checkerboard gives a suggestion of civilization in surreal images, whether associated with offices, hospitals, aristocratic decor or temples. Someone had to put down the tiles.

lana

I was also thinking about the regularity, and repetitiveness of the chequerboard flooring that becomes uncanny. I also think that there is something in the nostalgic element of liminal in these floors, they are often asociated with other nostalgic spaces, home kitchens from the 50's, diners. So to see this removed from the other elements that make it homely it becomes disconcerting. Warp it and it starts to represent the death, decay or demise of these safe feeling places we remember.

Emily Broth

I think it's almost entirely the "mechanistic repetition" bit; I can't think of anything more artificial than a checkerboard pattern. Nature really never produces something like that, so it implies human design, and if human design is nonsensical/abandoned you can really easily create the uncanny/liminal feeling.

ScarJust

When you said that home is always an improvised situation, that really hit me. It made me think about how as a Gen X american I have moved so many times that I have lost count. Every home has been temporary. I grew up in multiple apartments, rented homes, and town houses. Maybe the liminal aesthetic is popular because it captures the experience that we are always just passing through. Home is someone else's idea that we are supposed to take up.

D Muthulingam

Guh, appreciate your work so much! After my nightly meditation on brutalist architecture, enjoyed this on liminal spaces--brutalism is often always photographed in this liminal way--so often empty, so many angles, the sparseness of concrete, with a hint of ambivalent soviet nostalgia. I then hopped on tiktok and was struck by the liminality of contemporary background design in a lot of influencer "clean girl" content - grays and whites, devoid of ornament, not so much minimal as blankness...and i wonder if its tapping into this same promise--of respite from your own identity, the possibility that with this rigorous 4 hour morning routine through gray space, you too can be birthed into a Better You. The feelings of liminality, alas, have already been well colonized by marketing.

Forgiveness333

Love the idea of the American Dream as something liminal. I actually think that perspective is well reflected in 20th century art as well; the works of David Lynch and David Hockney are two that immediately spring to mind where the trappings of the American Dream - and the way it can strip away identity - are explored. I also think it’s interesting that, across both of those examples, the landscape of California is in focus in a major way. I think Hollywood presents an ideal template for expression of something liminal, first via the myth of Hollywood and the way the story, and the product shapes our relationship to the American Dream, and then as the physical place of Hollywood (and LA more widely), which is filled with lifeless commercial buildings, dark desolate roads, an encroaching, empty desert, and the overall sense of something that has already passed there.

Forgiveness333

I was so surprised she didn’t mention the Red Room or Twin Peaks! Lynch is the archetypical 20th century liminal master.

Olivia Bojo

I've read Blaise Pascal years ago in high school, and a phrase that always stuck with me is this: "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie". (The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me. )

SHEEBCORE

a hallway with a lemon in it is a lemonal space. thank you.

Tarso (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-14 12:00 Chessboard floor is liminal because of the repeated succession of white and black squares. Because black and white are polar opposites, the repeated contrast accentuates the invisible lines that separate them, and the brain sorts of picks on this although this line doesnt exists in itself and that is what is liminal. The awareness of that contrast.
2024-05-06 14:32 Chessboard floor is liminal because of the repeated succession of white and black squares. Because black and white are polar opposites, the repeated contrast accentuates the invisible lines that separate them, and the brain sort of picks on this although those lines doesnt exists in themselves and that is what is liminal. The awareness of that invisible boundary between visible spaces. Edit: It also may involve failure of presence or failure of absence or even both: since the line dividing is not really there but rather is extracted from the contrast between squares, it functions as failure of absence because the line is not really there which also is failure of presence. It is both at the same time. Or maybe I'm overthinkning this.

Chessboard floor is liminal because of the repeated succession of white and black squares. Because black and white are polar opposites, the repeated contrast accentuates the invisible lines that separate them, and the brain sort of picks on this although those lines doesnt exists in themselves and that is what is liminal. The awareness of that invisible boundary between visible spaces. Edit: It also may involve failure of presence or failure of absence or even both: since the line dividing is not really there but rather is extracted from the contrast between squares, it functions as failure of absence because the line is not really there which also is failure of presence. It is both at the same time. Or maybe I'm overthinkning this.

Max Hermann

I really love the story about the swiss mercenaries - it is for personal reasons, however. I'm swiss, and as a kid, I used to be homesick when having to go to camp for a week or two. I would tell my dad, that I was afraid to go, because I was afraid of having to cry in front of the others. His way of comforting me, was to tell me the story of the swiss mercenaries, who were reported to break out in tears, if someone started to sing a traditional swiss song. Also: My name is literally "Hans". So you hit the nail on the head three times for me by coincidence. Oh, and fun fact: While in high-german you use the word "Heimweh" (Home-Pain) for homesickness, in my regional dialect you use "Längi-Zyti" (Long-Timey) to describe it. The latter term tries to express the phenomenon of time feeling elongated, if you miss 'home'.

Sappho's Friend

I find many liminal spaces comforting because there are no chaotic sensory stimuli in them, and theres no one to statre at me and judge me.

Ben Lash

My theory is that it goes back to high school- you're late to class, all the doors close. Suddenly, the hallways that you've always seen as loud and crowded are empty and silent. This is bad- because you're late for class. You're not SUPPOSED TO BE HERE RIGHT NOW.

abi

tbh I rewatch this ever month or so.

gijoes

another commenter mentioned dreams and my assumption, based on my experience, is that many dreams have an unsettling liminal quality. I worked in corporate America for many years and had recurring dreams that weren't quite nightmares or even just "bad dreams"; they had a quality of eerie limbo. I was in these archetypal liminal spaces, like a cityscape (I particularly remember a stairwell in the anchorage of a bridge), or an odd urban/exurban expanse. Always at night, there were no other people anywhere, I was always slightly lost, and I always had a sense of urgency, as if toward a goal/destination (although the goal was never explicitly clear). There was no outright panic or feeling of threat, but always a sense of anxiety that I was losing time. I may have felt what I could describe as a sense of nervous exhilaration, but definitely not comfort. When I stopped working in corporate culture, the dreams stopped. After watching this video, I wonder how much culture has to do with how we react to liminal spaces. Had I been raised in a more mindful tradition, would I have perceived these liminal dream spaces more as beautiful, rather than as a threat to my efficient use of time?

zambonita

I am BEGGING for a tangent on the sublime pls

Vlad Timbolmas

I love how you manage to give a theoretical framework for a lot of my feelings. Does anyone else consider that “Paris, Texas” (1984) have a liminal dimension? Now that I think about it, I guess this aspect contributes to the great impact that this movie had on me.

Thomas McBride

i can't remember if you mentioned this in the video, but if you haven't, play alan wake 2! there's some cool liminality going on in that one!

Sappho's Friend

I remember that ever since i was a wee baby, like 4-5 years old (this was the mid 2000s) I was always fascinated with road tunnels; the emergency exit doors with the bright green exit signs, bright red SOS telephone signs, the dimly lit symmetrical space, especially when the tunnel is empty. I always wanted us to actually stop and explore these, but i knew that would be dangerous. I think several people were independently always fascinated with and noticed this aesthetic, but back then i didnt have a word for it. Somewhat related, through the desolate artificiality angle, I was also fascinated (and again still am) with electrical substations and high voltage power grids. They gave me a kind of excited nervous feeling in my stomach that's hard to describe. Sorry about low image resolution: https://ibb.co/my9jrPS . More recently i thought this stuff might be related to ASD, idk. Got to say though, the LiminalSpaces subreddit is absolutely and utterly flooded with unrelated images, like foggy forests or cabins in the woods (both lovely but not liminal), grazing animals in a field, vaporwave or creepy images, and it's all heavily upvoted, while liminal images get downvoted. Recently a literal pic of someone's car got posted and upvoted over 200 times, it's like satire but not lol. Im sad and kinda angry about this :(

Fr3nchFrii

If the movies Mirror Mask or Coherence have yet to be mentioned as potential liminally themed movies, they, plus one other I am frustrated with trying to remember the name of but it gave me nightmares for months, have really stuck with me for reasons outlined in this video. Mirror Mask was a movie I watched in high school I think, but potentially after I had been institutionalized a few years after highschool. I haven't watched it in quite some time but remember still enjoying it both artistically and in the manner in which you described the relief or comfort of liminal spaces such as hotels. Coherence I saw when I was in my mid to late twenties, which was tumultuous at best, and honestly felt like the cumulation of a liminal decade in most aspects of my internal and external experiences.. this movie was one of the most unsettling psychological horror movies I ever saw and I used to be one of those pretentious horror movies fans that most likely inflicted low grade damage on my psyche in my quest to find yet a more disturbing film than the last. This super low budget, slow burn, b/indie movie adjacent kept me terrified existentially for some time. I'm curious to revisit it now that I'm 35, and have a much healthier, resilient mental baseline, stability in who I am, and a huge shift in perception of the world order, so to speak. I'm super annoyed I can't remember the last one I had in mind but already made this comment so long I hesitate to post due to shame that I sometimes wonder if I'll ever fully heal from. Thanks for all of the work you put into sharing these vastly important, and one might even say, timeless (to human life at the very least 😉), concepts of existence and humanity.

Fr3nchFrii

I relate to this so hard. Love foggy autumn nights that make me feel like I'm a witch or shape shifter.. terrified of the sea it's lovecraftian in the depths of its dark unknown and ominous presence.. although I did recently watch chill goblin's Lovecraft essay and our boy be racist as hell so that shines a garish and revealing light on the cosmic horror I've long loved, reducing it to the mundane ramblings of some civilized white dude who resented his Italian neighbors and what he was too ignorant to understand was actually the industry of capital terramorphing his reality into the chaos that has hulked out into the hustle culture, grindset suffocation so many fall in lock step with today. But I digtess, because it does not remove the looming sense of unease that comes with the terror of the sea for me. 🤘✌️

Pierfrancesco Crivellari

I'm not gonna read the 300+ comments to see if anyone suggested this, but I was having a conversation with a friend that suggested the uncanny feeling of the checkerboard floor is given because its the most artificial kind of pattern you can have, not only it is clearly artificial, more than any other flooring, but it also doesn't resemble anything we find in nature. (didn't put much thought into it, sorry if it's stupid)

Jessie Lees

It does suck that Lovecraft was racist. Although it doesn't particularly bother me, largely due to the fact that he's long dead. But also, because the man was afraid of penguins, so if something that adorable scared him, it makes sense literally anything perceived as "other" would also be terrifying to such a timid person. His writing still speaks of how to be afraid of literally everything mundane, and how psychologically everything can be terrifying. As long as I don't take anything he writes as a good idea, I feel that it's a good representation of the overall potential of human fears and racism is fear based as well. It adds to my amusement when reading, considering as a somewhat anxious person, how over the top it all is. Also, what is distraction and misattribution in the mind and what is truely scary. Sometimes we put blame on the wrong point of why something is off-putting like in the surrealism video.

Cynthia Sonier

I have a super wholesome nostalgia classic for the people fixated on Christmas commercials: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation! We watch a classic TV dad embarass and endanger himself to create the christmas of his dreams, which only ends in disaster. When he finally goes berserk, his own father admits to him that in his time, he got a big help from Jack Daniels. Moral of the story: it never was what it was. You were just young and without responsabilities back then,

Lucie Chalou

This is funny, I feel absolutely nothing about these pictures 😀 it's just a bunch of random stuff at night lol. It's kinda a shame though that we're not using them at night, I was thinking that life in cities should be devided into shifts so you'd be using all the hours in the day and you would relief the overcrowding, but I don't know how many people would agree with me

Lucie Chalou

Totally, plus it might also be the absolute perfection and harmony of the pattern, the way how it's perfectly regular in all dimensions, how there is a perfect balance between the amount and placement of both colors, which is evocative of the termodynamic death of the universe, where everything is perfectly disperesed and there is no more free energy to be used to increase enthropy, therefore the feeling of absolute stillness and cold

Mighty Yam

I don't experience a lot of these images as liminal spaces and I think the reason that is has to do with what you discussed about the uncanniness of travelling across America and coming across the same cookie-cutter stores again and again. It wakes a dread I feel in my stomach at seeing the bright light of an enormous McDonald's sign hovering above the hills beyond the highway at night. There's something so viscerally upsetting to me about that repetition, evoking the way I see a desert and instead of being struck by its unique ecological beauty I see only an empty space (eerily lacking) like skin flayed open to the sky. The repetition of the American rural architectural landscape makes me feel this way. I live in the UK now and it's difficult to explain this phenomenon to people who haven't grown up in rural America. There are no McDonald's signs visible from my train window.

Sienna M

Adding on to this to say that for me, the checkerboard floor always reminds me of 1950’s american kitchen tile, which I think is connoted with a broader idea of artificiality and an overall aesthetic of eerie “perfection”

Andrew May

I so love your set up and delivery of “Is it liminal?—It’s superfuckingliminal” that I’ve started replying to questions with that response. It’s okay: my echolalia ensures that nobody is expecting otherwise when I give back to them, “It’s superfuckingliminal.”

Nea

Could silence be a sub-set of a liminal space? I feel like I live in ours sometimes. Wish we could walk in-between. I miss you, love you and I'm sorry.

George Clutterbuck

Almost every day there have been things I have wanted to tell you and talk to you about. I hope one day you can forgive me for forcing us both to live in that silence. Without question, I love you and miss you too.

rj

The internet discourse around liminality is too clouded by the imagery of liminal space. Really, it comes in distinct forms that happen to be described with discrete concepts in several fields. Liminality of space - the popular conception of playing with impossible space Liminality of time - this occurs when you are waiting in a novel location or room with no clock, or windows, might include time flying Liminality of the mind - this comes from anthropology and refers to a particular mindset of being between social roles (adolescence and adulthood is a typical example for young adults) Liminality of the body - liminality applied to a subject, and a more general umbrella for kinds body horror, alteration of the human, or other, form into intermediate states (human - nonhuman) In my view surrealism is liminal, liminality of the body, and thus form, applied indiscriminately.

Aden Hundley

IDK if this has been mentioned yet but the new movie I Saw The TV Glow (a pretty obvious trans experience allegory) is basically one big liminal space!! (Or one big expression of liminality, with a lot of liminal space imagery strewn throughout). I thought it was great bc it never solves the tension of real and unreal, past and present, etc..

Cynthia Sonier

Anyone else here a fan of the OG Planet of the Apes? The reason why the ending delivered such a punch at the time and still does today is because the post-apocalyptic Statue of Liberty is a harsh reminder of the fragility and mortality of our civilisation (or was, before CGI gave us catastrophe shots a dime a dozen. So. many. depictions. of Manhattan skyscrapers being destroyed were part of 90s blockbusters before 9/11 happened). I think liminal places bring up similar feelings. Unlike the towers, the Statue of Liberty is still nice and shiny...but we have so many dead malls, abandoned fast food joints, empty office spaces, dead suburbs...symbols of american culture as important as Lady Liberty already abandoned. When we see a dead McDonald's, we're as shocked as Taylor kneeling on the beach in front of the statue, but at low intensity and in slow motion. We were warned about a sudden, brutal apocalypse and don't know what to do with a slow, creeping one.

Chelora

Liminal Spaces are so trans you guys

DaniloDaSelva

I haven't seen "Us", but the Shaman's Vision Quest scene emits considerable Hermann Hesse/Steppenwolf vibes. The Magical Theater ... it's been a while since I've read it, but definitely also a famous liminal place of literature.

Khloe Parsons

do a lot of courtrooms/courthouses have checkered floors? the tiles reminds me of school or court. both very liminal in their own right

Noel S

Malls were NOT about the future--they were prisons of the hyper-capitalist present. Mainstream, even alternative 80s culture was never futuristic. The 80s were about remixed nostalgia, from the 50s to the 60s and finally the 70s. The only truly futuristic culture was underground Black American music and dance.

Anne Berry

So - would you call a bazaar in Persia in 230 BC, a hyper-capitalist prison? Haven’t humans been making large areas to sell good for centuries? I don’t think that was invented in the 80’s, but I think the self aggrandizing physiology around them was. I don’t love malls or anything, I just think it’s a tad dramatic

Noel S

I was speaking about the specific aesthetic of malls in general, not their use. I'm not against shopping, just shopping in ugly spaces. And malls were mostly really ugly.

Ellie Fitzpatrick

There’s a beach resort my family sometimes visits, and it’s set up to look like a suburban neighborhood, but most of the time, it’s completely empty, and completely devoid of any of the irregularity and personal touches you’d see in a real neighborhood. I’ve always found it deeply uncanny.

Melanie De Nolf

You mentioned Odysseus. I wonder if part of the liminal feeling is impotence, of not being in a place where you chose to be and where you intend to do something (Troy where one fights or Ithaca where one murders one's wife's suitors or whatever). These images also make me hyperaware of myself as an observer, as subjective, and I don't quite know why. The pictures themselves have an objective feeling, probably made on a tripod, as if no one made them, and it leaves space to insert myself. I feel like I am being put in this perspective against my will. There's definitely a feeling of perspective when there's a dark doorway or something, because if you were closer to it, you could probably make out what's inside. Hard to parse how that all comes together though.

Jade

Commenting on the piece of art with the Pokémon cards and tomagachi from the perspective of a nerd; I always valued my cards not getting damaged growing up (and still do with magic the gathering) and seeing the dirty spaghetti fork almost slipping onto the card every time the shot of the painting was shown was uncomfortable for me in an interesting way. This is compounded by the fact that the artist chose to depict a specific printing of a card that is now worth upwards of $200k in mint condition. It creates a really interesting tension in the foreground but only for someone who can relate to the specific object depicted. Something that would one day be seen as holding incredible value being carelessly disregarded, and a fear of potential regret for that carelessness. The card becomes a symbol childhood lost, and not just lost but loss gone unobserved. The audience didn’t notice that their childhood was going to one day, symbolically, get covered in pasta sauce. So there’s a sense of regret over not appreciating the moments of childhood, and not having the capacity to appreciate them as a child without having an adult context to understand that those moments would be seen as precious to many in 30 years.

Murguly Mátyás

I think mushroom rings are natural liminal things. Mushrooms are always give the feeling of something between an animal and a plant. A circle from them is like a portal. No wonder they are called fairy rings or "witches" rings. And I think every culture have their own mushroom ring thing.

Gaoth gwyntog gwen

Same here, except instead of evoking the way I see desert, evoking the way I see snow, clouds, and water (mainly ocean or Great Lakes water not ponds or puddles). I've hardly ever seen desert. :)

Gaoth gwyntog gwen

The repetition of, in my experience, ice floe after ice floe on the river, or wave after wave on the beach, or tree canopy after tree canopy, and so on, is also different in a very painful? uncomfortable? boring? way from the nearly identical billboards and fast food places and parking lots. I tried often as a kid as sometimes try now to think of how the slight differences in repeated pieces of the world are similar, by imagining how the particular one at me was created, but imagining the suburbesque things in their making drags me into the agonies of society (to be fair, it's a society I don't like at all, maybe it would be nicer if I liked being here) whereas imagining how bits of the world crashed together to create the natural repeated units really leads me upon a whole world of imagination. natural disaster, certainly, but also happenings of great joy and beauty. And with a lot more moral ambiguity than moral complexity, I notice now, for whatever that's worth.

Gaoth gwyntog gwen

A lot of these things really are just bad uses of space, irregardless of time. Parking lots get me the most. I don't like cars. But parking lots, if they are going to be out on open ground and not above or below the relevant building, need to be planned so as to let things happen other than have cars ambiently there. Even if it is just a roof of solar panels, that can make a world of difference. But on the topic of overcrowding, it would be great if we could make pop-up shelters for travelling or homeless people to rest in some of the places that are used only at certain times.. Perhaps parking lots included, especially ones with solar panels above them.

R. Nowadays

Theory: If adolescence is a liminal time then, perhaps liminal spaces are so popular because as a society adults cannot grow out of adolescence. Being able to buy a house and support yourself and a family and have a wedding are the rituals of adulthood that we cannot afford anymore. So now we’re just stuck with the liminal and we feel at home there.

Connor Bugni

I HAVE THE EXACT SAME EXPERIENCE OF FEELING LIKE I INVENTED THE LIMINAL! I fantasized for years about making some kind of art that would capture that vibe. If it makes you feel better, you were the first to express the feeling of feeling like you invented the liminal before it blew up.

Shelby

My hypothesis on checkered floors is their timelessness; they could fit in in a 50s style diner or a grand hall or a modern home. So they exist everywhere and nowhere. Idk!

Joey

My very basic theory on checkerboard floors is that it is a combination of two diametrically opposed extremes, much like the liminal in and of itself (comfort and discomfort, nostalgia and alienation, horror and calm). Because it is not fully one or the other, it exists in an in-between state that cannot be easily catalogued by the brain.

心妤 蒋

I’m a backrooms fan, someone literally lives on nostalgia as well as desolation aesthetics, also a queer and neurodivergent person whom the concept of non-belonging, uncanny, and feeling there’s no real home to belong in this world in my veins. Here’s a fan work written about my views on the liminal aesthetics in general: Never underestimate what wonder could our world offer towards us, even through scary surprises. Constraints reigned over with a single hand do not live long here, yet in the vast medium where we named “The blue channel”, we will always see new tales unfold. I’ve heard that the Backroom’s entire lore: As people, as spaces, phenomenons and histories, all begin in the places of liminality, a construct born against being defined or constrained——As unspoken corners left out of grand narratives, As worlds between worlds that we barely examined passing by.  Loneliness, marginalization and antagonism would always be by your side in this purgatory we named “backrooms”,  but through exploration and communion, you would find yourself reaching across the aisles. After so much reading, you——the “Darkening Hallways”, shall step across your level’s entrance or exit, to visit the world populated by a sea of other levels: as a level-dweller, you could noclip between the entrance and exits assigned to your level just like the wanderers. I’m still worrying that the elaborations above aren’t intricate enough, or if I will discover loopholes and changes in the future. For this is the backrooms, the only set truth is that everything constantly evolves, in the vast metaphorical structures that lays ground foundations, in the pantheon speaking love and tears, in the small corners unnoticed by us all, also on each separate timelines——trust me, it’ll be the same in other universes I’ve been to. Falling into this hellish landscape is unfortunate——your former life, no matter in honey or onions, died in the moment when you no-clipped out from the boundaries of reality. Your life as a level-dweller won’t expect a definite end as an ordinary wanderer, but is an endless cycle of demolish and resurrection with a smile on your face, yet pain within your stomach and tears from your eyes. You would never know whether what awaits you in the next moment would be a swift annihilation towards The Broken End, or another span of thousand years of life. Living in the Backrooms often means sitting with this ever-lasting grief——for your past is as uncharted as the days led ahead. I can’t summarize these kaleidoscopes of embodied experiences into a single Aesop, because it would mean different to everyone, for our journeys are all unique. If I have to offer something for you as well as everyone else, the only thing I would say is that we are all in this together. Perhaps this is the only thing we shared. Each inhabit a small corner, within this ever-growing beautiful monstrosity.

AuntyPlant

The checkerboard pattern is often used in optical illusion art to manipulate perspective . I wonder if how it fucks with a person's sense of space and depth can make it feel eerie. The perspective of a checkered image is a little uncertain.

心妤 蒋

There is a specific branch in China too! Check Backrooms CN or 中式旧核

心妤 蒋

They are superfuckingliminal😂

Whitters

My favorite work of yours to date (okay, besides Twilight)! I think this would make a popular main channel video for sure.

CG

I wonder if anyone has read Dissipatio H.G. (The Vanishing) by Guido Morselli, was just thinkng about it in relation to this video

Anna

It’s maybe weird but this video is actually really comforting to me, like I often watch it to fall asleep. I hadn’t watched it in a few month, and coming back I realise that during my last depressive episode, all I could want to do was to take train to nowhere, like, I did not want to go anyplace, I just wanted to be in the train. So yeah the obsession for liminal spaces is still very much here 😅

Giancarlo Ps

RE: chequered patters and what makes them liminal - it could be because these delineate/emphasize spaces in an almost obsessively geometrical way (perfect squares; black and white). Liminal is a concept that intrinsically relates to space, and a chequered floor and/or walls will accentuate the perspective, depth and limits of that space. Think of De Chrico paintings which I always found super effing liminal - and I think it's the use of clean geometric lines and long shadows that contributes to this eerieness. It makes spaces look vast, emptier, and more lifeless

Cranial Embiggening

Does anyone know the beautiful jazzy piano piece played throughout this tangent?

Josh

What is the music at the start of part 3: Nostalgia? 36:32 It’s so beautiful

misslcd

Like many others I return to this video often - today I'm very hungover (it's superfuckingliminal) - and watching this video is the most comforting thing. Before discovering the theories of liminal spaces, I didn't have adequate words for why I love David Lynch's work so much - I used to describe it as feeling like an indescribable itch in my brain was being scratched, but I now recognise it as the thrill and the chill of the liminal.

AJ

I love this tangent so much. I would love to see a video on nostalgia, it seems tangential to liminality :)

rk

Love this tangent so much! Our experiences as women (both of us, along with the other women in the chat and in society at large), really can lend to finding comfort in liminal spaces. The constant messages we are bombarded with in a (mostly) misogynist society are exhausting, the constant hyper-vigilance of the signaling of potential victimhood or reification or loss of humanity, etc. are just exhausting (especially as they take place on such subconscious levels). Escaping to a place like a hotel for a little break is a genuine pleasure, release valve, small recovery of selfhood, sanity, etc. for me, too.

rk

ps - RE aesthetics of nostalgia, I think you’d love Jacques Rancière, the French theorist (he writes on the politics of aesthetics) but I think I’ve already mentioned this? Sorry if I have, I’m kind of exhausted all the time & don’t have a great memory.

rk

Thank you so much for this, illuminating for contemporary pop music. 🥂

The Feminine Trifecta

Theory on the checkerboard floors: they distort your depth perception and create an optical illusion effect that contributes to the liminal quality of the space. it’s visually overwhelming and so it makes everything feel surreal

Rose Dombegh

One of my family members got married recently, and the wedding felt SUPER liminal (in the initial "ritual of transition" sense). The rows of seats were set up to create a passageway that the brides-to-be walked through ... they entered this passageway as fiances and exited it as a married couple. The entire ceremony -- the exchange of vows, professions of love, exchange of rings, signing of legal documents -- took place in this space removed from the rest of the world from the passageway of guests. The entire ceremony was held in this (metaphorical and physical and spiritual) liminal space. I was surprised by how powerful it felt. More than symbolic -- almost magical, like something metaphysical had changed about their relationship. (This was the case even though the ceremony wasn't tied to any explicit religious beliefs or language). I think even for "secular" people ceremony & ritual can be really really important.

ANDREA

This tangent has a double effect on me: the subject itself is attractive, and also the fact that when I first saw this video, I was entering a long liminal period of my life. In 2023, I decided to move abroad, and the process of adaptation still feels so uncanny to me. Everything seems out of place... maybe it’s myself that is out of place, and the world reflects this strange inner feeling. I think watching this video validates the emotional process I’m living through; in a way, I can feel less lonely in my experience as an alien in a world where aliens are not welcome.

liz

hear me out: checkerboard floors (aside from associations with tile flooring you might see in a grocery store or in a school) also create an illusion that you're literally on a checker/chessboard! gameplay as a liminal space, endlessly traversable but only under specific rules, elevated and removed from "real life"

Sabina Dewfield

Checkerboard floors have been used for centuries in hallways and perambulatory spaces where they might be many people moving around. I think architects must have noticed that people unconsciously speed up when walking on them (they aren’t solid, so our brain wants to find ‘solid ground’ again - more psychologically comfortable). I think that might explain checkerboard floors in liminal spaces.

ATIGLAIN

Re: checkerboards: I think the liminality comes in part from its presence as something entirely unnatural, something that could only ever be man made. In liminal spaces, these man made objects are almost never presented with the people or society that made them; they are thus removed from that context and their existence becomes a permanent suggestion of what was once the case. There were once people here, there were once humans, but they are not here right now. When will they be back? No one knows

Anna Kelly

for me the checkerboard motif immediately makes me think of yin and yang, and between good and evil, between worlds

Andrew May

This tangent is my “middle of the night shut up brain go back to sleep you’re thinking yourself into knots” medicine.

Andrew May

I did this ill-conceived all-nighter rehearsal at school once for a play, and at around 1am we thought it was a good idea to play hide and seek and sardines with all the lights off. Nobody found me lying across the top of the bookshelf in the faculty library. Superfuckingliminal!

Andrew May

I have the opposite experience of hospital hallways and waiting rooms in that they feel unhomely to me. Especially when there’s this attempt at interior decorating or prints of paintings or photography hanging on the walls trying to make it feel lived in when it’s really an in between place. Plus my medial horror fears get triggered!

Cranial Embiggening

Does anyone know the last song starting around 1 hour, 21 minutes in? It’s so wonderful — I wish it were all listed!

April Tuesday

as for checkerboard patterns, obviously checkers is a game most people only play as children (or perhaps only in the past, do people still play checkers?), childhood being an ephemeral time in our culture; the pattern also reminds me of target or kmart, nasty floors, fluorescent bulbs, messy shelves, hiding inside the clothes racks as a child; also, sonic 3d blast used that pattern, i think it's a useful pattern for visually communicating whatever the brain needs to prevent dizziness when for instance (and i'm making this up, it's fabrication and speculation but it kinda sounds probable) the floor is all the exact same tile with no distinguishing features—also it's a lazy way of making things visually interesting?

Goldenhand

The bird cry at 1:14:44 almost made me wet myself, holy god.

frogsmore

I was going to ask if it is Natalie playing? Did you find out anything

Cranial Embiggening

I don't believe it's Natalie, but unfortunately I have still discovered nothing. It's such a great emotional piece that still comes into my head, and I don't know how to discover it. I guess I could try SoundHound. I think I will; thanks for your comment!

Phillip Loe

Rewatching this after the Backrooms movie—I love this Tangent video :)

Brazen muse

I did the exact same thing!

AJ

I love this Tangent so gd much