Liminal Spaces: The Internet’s New Obsession

My introduction to liminal spaces came in the form of this playthrough made by Markiplier, a famous videogame Youtuber.

The Stanley Parable is a ‘walking simulator’ game where the player quite literally just walks through an increasingly alien office building. Though the appearance of the office never warps ala House of Leaves, it manages to create a sense of dread and sheer strangeness that leaves a player unsettled.

When I got around to playing the game myself, the absence of Markiplier’s comments and occasional (well, regular) shouting made me feel truly alone.

Offices are supposed to be busy places. In my short stint as a technical writer in a BPO, I learned to associate offices with the low hum of air conditioning, the constant ringing of phones, and the sound of my own fingers rapidly hammering away at the keyboard.

There was none of that in this game.

Every room was empty and the hallways stretched out in an eerie way, just slightly off enough to make it look…weird.

Aside from existential dread, the Stanley Parable left me with a feeling of being unsettled that, until now, I can’t quite put into words in the same way that one cannot exactly remember the details of a dream.

What I can do, however, is show you.

This is a photograph of a painting done by Edward Hopper, an American painter better known for creating ‘ Nighthawks’. The more popular Nighthawks also explores the feeling of liminality but I find that the sense of strangeness that liminal spaces exude stands out more in this painting.

Since I am no expert in the arts, I’ll let the MET do the talking.

The water and the rocks in the foreground are painted in loose, limpid washes of color, and the repeated angles of the station’s various gables, punctuated by the slender vertical of the flagpole that rises from its roof, are more tightly delineated. This is a sunny, tranquil landscape whose subject nonetheless alludes to the darker possibilities of dangerous rescues from the ocean.

White dominates the painting and despite the color’s association with purity and peace, the overwhelming whiteness of Hopper’s Coast Guard Station reminds me more of the lights over an operating table than a warm summer sun.

It creates the same sense of dread that the office lights of Stanley Parable does and leaves the viewer with a feeling that something is about to go terribly wrong.

This feeling of anxious anticipation is, of course, part of what makes a liminal space what it is.

The Oxford dictionary defines the word liminal as ‘occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’.

Liminal spaces exist in an in-between world characterized by time just as much as it is by location.

An office building during work hours is not a liminal space. But when everyone is home and all that’s left are fluorescent lights that keep a silent watch over the hallways and you, alone, are walking through this altered reality?

That office building becomes a liminal space.

If I sound like I’m over analyzing this, I definitely am but the thing is, I’m not alone. A quick Youtube search will show you hundreds of videos about liminal spaces.

I’m definitely not the first person to write about it. Dozens of video essayists are way ahead of me.

The internet is obsessed with liminal spaces. From video essays, photo compilations, Discord servers, and subreddits, liminal spaces have steadily wormed their way into the internet’s collective consciousness.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the demographics of the internet. A good chunk of the internet’s most active, and therefore culture-shaping, users are in their teens to late twenties.

While I was picking out a keyword for this blog post, Google Trends showed me a related search term: Liminality.

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.

from Wikipedia

Given that liminality describes an ambiguous stage during a rite of passage, I can’t help but wonder if this is what makes liminal spaces both captivating and dreadful.

We may not think of age in terms of space but considered in this light, the teens to twenties stage of life is, in itself, a liminal space.

There is both anxiety and excitement with each stage passed. Graduations, your undergraduate thesis, the first job. These are all rites of passage that leave us feeling more accomplished and ‘grown up’ with each threshold that gets passed through.

Yet at the same time, all of these passages are just tiny ones into the grand daddy of them all- adulthood.

At 21 years old, I now understand how stupid and socially graceless my 16 year old self was. I expect to feel the same way about who I am now when I get to my 30s.

But at the same time, would I truly become an adult later in life? Or will I just become another of those ‘adults by birth certificate’ who manage to age without developing the much coveted wisdom that should come with age.

In this, I am not alone either.

As exhilarating as getting our bachelors was, I heard my peers joke about their budding adulthoods in self-deprecating and sometimes, too real ways.

A few months after that, the existential dread started to sink in.

In a new world without GPAs, class schedules, and clear project goals, I noticed how lost everyone was. The passage that happened didn’t feel like a threshold. It felt like being chucked out of airlock from an Among Us spaceship.

Suddenly, we’ve been thrust out into the world and spat into a large empty field without so much as a point of reference.

And we look back.

Originally published at http://allialuzong.wordpress.com on November 1, 2020.