Liminal spaces
One of my absolute favorite modern aesthetics is the nostalgia-fueled concept of liminal spaces…places we’ve been to in dreams, or places we used to frequent but that are now completely abandoned and forgotten about but stuck in time.
The most important aspect is that these places are devoid of any humanity...no traces that someone was recently here, and to a degree, a feeling that even the person “viewing” the abandoned environment might not be here either…almost a found footage take on documenting a space. For me personally, the best of these places feel like places that you would be chased through in a dream, with legs heavy and unwilling as the space itself starts to feel like an unworldly threat.
The two big genres of liminality are "dreamcore” and “lostcore”, with the latter grounded in places that appear as if they are in real world, yet preserved and forgotten. The former are places that feel like twisted, slightly changed, dreamlike environments that are based on nostalgic memories of places you experienced as child, such as malls, hotel hallways, toy stores, indoor pools, but with some sort of unsettling dreamy change. To a degree, graffiti is making it really hard to capture this feeling in well-conditioned abandoned locales, because it’s obvious that there has been modern or recent human activity, and that the space is anything but forgotten about. Much of modern liminal content is entirely 3D art since these types of spaces are not readily available to shoot, but with modern near-photorealistic 3D rendering tools, they still take on their own version of realism.
Which brings us here, to a place a few weeks ago when one of the thickest inland fogs I’ve seen rolled through. I set out with my X100V to try and capture a slice of the feeling that was heavy in the thick air.
It was quiet and empty, yet entirely familiar from another plane. The first stop was the high school tennis court. The green color that the mist-soaked court took on reminded me of those old bean-counter visors, or perhaps the glass lampshade on a banker’s desk light.
There is almost a feeling of dread as everything outside of the nets is rendered completely black. A sense of being hunted and finding solace in a dimly lit court in the middle of nowhere, a momentary reprieve before the hunt renews.
Indiscriminate shoe marks score the surface, as faded as the court lines. How many have experienced just this moment before me? How many MEs have experienced this exact moment, here, in this place?
A creak…the gate that was once inexplicably stuck has seemingly opened itself…reprieve…escape…
We fumble our car keys in hand as the fog thickens and the slightly falling mist begins to obscure our vision…we don’t see what hunts us, but we know it surrounds and stalks. Finally, we manage to fling the door open and fire the restless engine, as the daggers of our high beams pierce the darkness…safety, for a moment.
We watch as the gas gauge plunges from F to E in real time as we beat the steering wheel in desperation…an abandoned skate park sits off the side of the road, and we use what little momentum we have left to pull towards it, dashing into the mercury-light-soaked bowls in one last futile attempt to save ourselves.
Here, shapes and shadows take twisted, unexpected forms, just as the unseen hunter twists and subverts our predilections for these once-familiar spaces.
A final attempt at a sprint to safety undone by an unshakable feeling of being mired in quicksand, we collapse at the foot of the stairs as smooth and jagged versions of the same reality fill our visions, and the silent hunter silently consumes us before…
We wake up, cold sweat soaked, reorienting into the familiar, urgently rejecting the machinations of our sleeping mind…but knowing that we’ll inevitably return to this place to be hunted once more.