[webtv]

I was thinking about liminal spaces the other day, and why they might be so interesting to a lot of people (me included).
my thoughts -

• they can be impossible spaces, depending on what kind of liminal space you mean. I'm not really talking about the type of liminal spaces that are basically just abandoned childhood spaces, which tend to rely on their audience being familiar with the space from their childhood to get an emotional reaction: like soft play areas at night or something. I don't feel like these are universal liminal spaces because they have specfic cultural context; someone from another country who didn't grow up going to soft play areas isn't going to feel as unsettled by these images. I mean shit like endless corridors, or backrooms; weird endless spaces that don't actually lead anywhere: now that is all very literally liminal. There's a French art film my dad said he had to watch in art college, I can't remember what it's called, I might add it if I find out, but there's a lot of shots of these corridors with the voiceover saying 'endless corridors' over and over again which sounds... pretty damn liminal to me. That's the kind of impossible and unsettling places I mean
  
• You could definately characterise a lot of these liminal spaces as having impossible physics and spaces that don't make realistic sense; I mean the whole premise of the backrooms is that you no-clip out of reality. I think this idea is very similar to digital space: the internet is NOT a physical space, that's its whole thing. You mentioned the idea of how the internet affects our relationship with physical spaces: an idea I have is that whilst the internet is a very non-physical space, liminal spaces are VERY physical and overwhelming. I don't have like a pyscological theory reason for why this is: idk maybe the prevelance the internet has now is making us obsess over ideas of much more physical spaces? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that the internet is a liminal space, it doesn't have that physicalty, but I do think that  digital spaces and liminal spaces share endlessness and hard or impossible to comprehend physics, and I feel like the popularity of liminal spaces makes a lot of sense in the setting of the internet - there is something very... internet in liminal spaces
  

• This idea of endless impossible spaces also reminds me of space, which is something people have always been fascinated with: scary and unknown and really really cool. They both are unknowingly vast and invoke exestential and unsettling feelings. It also reminds me of living spaces, spaces that change around you and again don't make physical sense.
  
• I like the presence that the setting itself has in being unsettling here, I feel like there's something a little dystopian in it, alot of industrial archetecture and city buildings I feel fit the liminal vibe very well
  

Major fuck yes to all of this. Was going to respond sooner but wanted to give it proper due. 

Firstly, this isn't it, but when you mentioned the unknown art film, I immediately thought of Michael Snow's "Wavelength" from 1967, which is an hour of the camera slowly zooming in on an empty room only to eventually end up at a image pasted on the wall--the image of an ocean, which then fills the screen. Synchronously to this convo, it fits too, given its hypnotic effect regarding an empty space only to reveal an endless space within a (conversely quite confined) space. Here it is, just as footnote: https://vimeo.com/226140780. 

Secondly, I very much agree with and dig this distinction between the more generic form of liminal space that is a little more culturally transposable and not really contingent upon distinct human memories/association (such as backrooms, and the Backrooms meme image: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/news...32/622.jpg. What excites me so much is that these types of spaces are, as you say, far less marked by cultural distinction, other than general contextualization within modern industrial society, and yet they have this universalish quality, as if there is some broader collective unconscious deeply altered once humans began to really fuck with our relationship to the spatiality of the pre-human ecosystem (although even then, it's not all industrial, as there is more ancient shit like old Roman pathways with big arches and pillars or the Parisian catacombs that give off similar vibes). It's as if built space opens up a weird portal to something beyond, if even merely mentally--although if you go wandering around some areas and spaces like we're talking about, it can genuinely feel like you enter another realm, another time, another real...

To the point about the internet: YES. Marshall McLuhan has this idea that each new technology obsolesces the thing that it replaces, and also retrieves some already long-obsolesced technology or form of content. So, for instance, literature became the content of movies, movies became the content of TV, and if we bend McLuhan's mid-century (60s/70s) commentary to our time, pretty much--well, everything has become the content of the internet. But what I'm getting at, in relation to your astute speculation re liminality and the web, is that it's as if the more that we obsolesce three-dimensional space (through the internet, faster travel, urban planning, environmental destruction etc.), we develop a greater deal of nostalgia and investment in it as an almost alien or exotic object. Hence why, if we accept that liminal space is all about the intensity and, like, sheer fucking Thereness of the physical, a preoccupation with physical space has become a specific obsessive tendency in this very much not physical realm of reality (the internet). 

OR, additionally, it is as if the allure of the true liminal space has always been there, and in this unconsciously driven way, that has ended up showing up in the architecture/organization/visual/psychogeographical structure of the internet. And that shit I really like. The ways in which ancient elementalities resurface and remanifest in futuristic contexts. 

And just, to your last point, I've theorized before that the effect of dystopian/'urban hell' landscapes (and also 'night walk' pics) is a cathartic and possibly even emancipatory impulse to render the places in which people typically feel so repressed, oppressed, and helpless as something not just aesthetically pleasing (sort of like traumacore), but also...idk, I think a lot about time and temporality in relation to this shit, how some spaces can fuck with your sense of time, or seem in photos like they could really warp or fuck with time profoundly (like a house in which time runs slower than the outside) and so I feel like there's some sense of solace or catharsis in seeing our world abandoned, not even so much in the cold-take doomer sense of waiting for it to be over and misanthropy, but more like the idea that seeing a world without us is a potential deconditioner to envision our relation to society and each other and the planet differently and thusly act differently, idk. It's not so much extinction we're seeing in abandoned dystopic contexts, or that they're dystopic because they're abandoned, per se, but more so that they're pre-arrival, like waiting for us to arrive and do something differently, experience them less violently, under less control. Like how some spaces have that sense that they were just ~waiting~ for you to find them/see them/etc.

Other relevant media: the great short story "Windeye" by Brian Evenson, involving a house that has a window that can be seen from the outside but not from the inside: https://pen.org/windeye/

And Mark K. Danielewski's House of Leaves, the classic cult novel revolving around a house whose interior measurements no longer match those of its apparent outside scale: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2480..._of_Leaves (haven't finished it ever but do recommend to everyone as one of the most unsettling things you will probably ever read)