Tangent: Liminal Spaces

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 😅

Anna

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

CG

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.

Mighty Yam

I keep coming back to this video 💕

Eleanor Southgate

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

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,

Cynthia Sonier

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)

Pierfrancesco Crivellari

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.

Vlad Timbolmas

I am BEGGING for a tangent on the sublime pls

lilmil

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?

IronMisanthrope

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.

Datura Niko

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

SHEEBCORE

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. )

Olivia Bojo

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.

D. Muthulingam

The jumpscare was unnecessary 😭

Aleksandar Petrović

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.

ScarJust

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.

lana

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.

Dcat217

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

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.

Amelie Cabergas

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

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 :)

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

Sappho's Friend

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.

Paola Nicoll Alzuru Castillo

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

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

Matthew Harris

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.

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

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.

Jordan

Hearing Natalie make main channel Contrapoints references feels very meta somehow

Jordan

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

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.

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.

Asche Helling

This is the best tangent so far

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.

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

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.

Tasha 3D

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

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

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

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)

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.

Gregg D.

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.

Kia Nicole Tudor

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

checkerboard=European/American yin yang?

Adrian Coburn

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

HailFall

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

lotf's art made me wanna die a lil

Natalie, your mind is so fuckin cool.

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.

sunlit_music

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

Andrew May

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 💚

oo yes that would be such a cool video!

Aristana Scourtas

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.

Aurelian

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.

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

Mary Thompson

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!

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

Lumiel

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!

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.

Natalie, you’re such a gem. Wow.

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

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

Sadie Rae

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