Liminal Spaces (Exploring an Altered Reality)

these paintings have been viewed by undoubtedly thousands of people maybe millions but they're rarely seen they're never really analyzed they're never really contemplated but they are works of art nonetheless someone sat down planned them designed them painted them and finalized them to some of you they might feel off like they haven't been put into the right context or there's something very big that's missing from them and that's because there is this is all background art for LEGO sets one of the very first things you learn about design this great seemingly obvious revelation is that everything that is not from nature is design anything from the most magnificent monument to something as small as a toothpick someone somewhere had to sit down usually sketch out their idea and develop it for pretty much every building and every product out there and the stuff surrounding that product the packaging and presentation also had to be designed and developed someone had to make something they knew wasn't going to be consciously appreciated by most people and put the effort and work required to make it presentable even when a lot of it was going to be covered up in this case the art director in illustrator Chris Barrett made these the reason some of these backgrounds feel off is because they're not really meant to be seen this way usually they have a large Lego set in the middle general set information piece count logos all this other stuff that obscures about forty to fifty percent of it so when you take all this stuff away when you remove it from its context the result is this very empty image they have no people not even minifigures there's not even a focal point really this feeling I get from looking at them is loneliness obviously but also a kind of odd very slight unsettling tinge as if I'm not really supposed to be looking at these because well I'm not really they're designed to be filled in with something else that gives it life this feeling I get and this subject matter is similar in some ways to a recent surge of semi viral photo compilations that you may or may not seen pop up in your recommended these types of photos these often low-quality atmospheric lonely nostalgic and in many ways deeply uncanny images have gathered a small cult following of sorts the locations that these photos depict many have referred to as liminal spaces [Music] the back rooms are probably the biggest baddest most famous example of a liminal space they're basically an idea devised by a very simple creepypasta that has been continuously expanded and made famous through other posts videogames memes and YouTube videos the original post describes how if you no clip out of reality which is a video game term that refers to when a player passes through what are supposed to be physical objects and boundaries you will find yourself in an endless maze of rooms carpet and fluorescent lights that extends for 600 million square miles so you're basically trapped there this photo is usually the go-to image to give someone a good idea of what the back rooms are it's a photo that depicts the yellow decaying walls and carpet of some old office space or storage room that to my knowledge no one knows the true location of this creepypasta is especially unique because unlike other stories the fear for the most part does not come from some mysterious creature but the setting itself there have been a lot of lore extending posts that try to describe things like levels and such and that's all fine and dandy but I think the simplicity of the concept the visceral idea of being trapped in an uncomfortable place isolated and permanently cut off from the world you once knew and that it can just happen randomly is already pretty disturbing now I called the back rooms the most famous example of a liminal space before defining liminal space because it gives you a good idea of what I'm trying to get at liminal space is pretty much the most accepted term for these kinds of images on the internet the definition of liminal according to Google is one relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process or two occupying a position at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold ultimately if we just look at the etymology of the word we're Lyman simply means threshold in Latin we can understand it pretty easily on Wikipedia liminality has an anthropology definition that describes the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage this describes more emotional liminal spaces rather than physical like a divorce job loss or moving to a new place I think combining these two passages taking the qualities of a transitional space and the qualities of disorientation gives us a pretty apt description of these images I consider a liminal space at least for the purposes of this video to be a transitional space that is unsettling an empty parking lot a house that has had all his furniture taken out an abandoned mall a playground at night a school long after classes have ended if you feel something while looking at these images he'll if you've ever been in these types of places in these types of conditions and do you feel something you're not alone many have claimed the back rooms or at least the back rooms photo seemed oddly familiar as is the claim with a lot of these liminal space photos I wanted to really get to the bottom of why this is really isolate the reason why so many people across the internet with vastly different memories and experiences claim that these seemingly loosely connected sets of photos seem so oddly familiar is there this grand conspiracy are these photos randomly generated to access specific nostalgia producing glands in the brain have we all know clipped into a different dimension as children and suppress these memories deep inside of us only to be reignited by photos on the internet with a snippet of Porter Robinson music no probably not I have a theory that the reasons for this are quite simple and I'm going to be demystifying some of these photos to get a thorough analysis so if you want to get your childlike wonder destroyed then don't move forward with this video you can find Tumblr posts listing off all kinds of places and specific states that they claim have these altered reality qualities even without images attached and while I understand most of them there's some I don't get this feeling from at all like any target what do they mean by that why just target it's just a superstore if you said abandoned target maybe but just a target and then churches in Texas I've been to churches in Texas I haven't found anything weird about them also that's far too broad do they know how big Tex is there have got to be thousands of churches in all kinds of different places what specifically are they referring to likewise it's not like all these photos have an effect on me some don't make me feel anything at all in this video you may not feel anything from these images or relate at all to what I'm talking about you may even find it pretentious and that's okay but it's hard to ignore the phenomenon that is happening on social media and the feelings of thousands of people without some analysis near the end of the post someone makes the claim that because our brains are hard-wired for context places that are outside of a certain expected time and space feel strange and I hate to agree with a tumblr post but I think they're right about this context thing these places were designed for specific purposes by humans even the most obscure rarely thought over a bit of architecture had to be designed and built by someone and they are designed with a certain context in mind and when they are taken out of their expected designed context they can become uncanny a play place should have children in it socha to school shopping malls or airports aren't designed to be empty they should be buzzing with life an empty sail shack abandoned in the dead of night becomes alien but this isn't the same thing as seeing something completely strange like random items filled with beans for example liminal spaces are at first surprising but completely explainable inevitable actually we don't usually take time out of our day to think of a place we are familiar with in an unfamiliar context it's like so when you see the true length of fire hydrants for example you're at first slightly shocked we always see them as these little stumps in the ground but then you realize of course how else would a fire hydrant work we're seeing another side to something familiar context is a fundamental part of how our brains work think about all the color and pattern illusions out there that are able to bend shapes and colors simply by changing the context the brain is a context machine that's why I think you rarely see nature in these photos unless it's a heavily edited digital image or obviously artificial nature has no designed context really it grows where it wants to where it seems fit and we've lived with this knowledge all our lives so when we see something consisting of nature at a different time of day or with no people we don't think of it as an altered reality it's a landscape there's nothing unnatural about it the complete and utter lack of people is probably one of the most powerful aspects of these images there's a word for this from the dictionary of obscure sorrows can op SIA the eeriness of places left behind you get that sense that the world was once full of people but then they all vanish mysteriously leaving everything running in quick total abandonment there's another element that may add to this ultra reality feeling the lighting is especially powerful many places are unnaturally lit either by the atmospheric cast of a streetlight or by the sickly glowing tube of a fluorescent light this Sayles Shack I mentioned before has this great black abyss surrounding it separated by the orange ground this auditorium has one light source behind the viewer that only dissipates the further you look on through unusual lighting it accentuates that disorientation and through more conventional artificial lighting it accentuates that familiarity a vast majority of the lighting is similar to when people take pictures that are not professional photos you can imagine have been taken with cheap family-owned cameras people have often used this word in comment sections to describe this effect of familiarity Anna Moya again from the dictionary of obscure sorrows annamaya is defined as nostalgia for a time that you've never known others have pondered about the validity of reincarnation even more have claimed they've seen images like these and their dreams and I think this is all because people have seen these places before okay not literally like not everyone went to these specific locations during their childhoods but you've probably been to places that are extremely similar at least in spirit many of these photos are from old buildings old homes places with decaying 80's and 90's decor play areas for toddlers places that if you were a child born anywhere between the 90s and the 2000s you probably experience whether on a road trip or in your own town it took me about 30 seconds to find the origin of this photo because I recognized it after some memory searching it's literally just an old Taco Bell this picture is probably from some kind of rank or shopping mall many of these are just isolated areas of some people's homes these heavily edited photos with their unnaturally steep hills bizarre residential planning and increased saturation look a lot like backgrounds to kids television shows these photos of green rolling hills look very similar to the Bliss default wallpaper for Windows XP and why are people nostalgic for that image because they use that operating system as kids these are just playgrounds arcades slides you ever been to one of those as a kid this is a sonic drive-thru this one is just a gas station I mean have you seen what most of America looks like the back rooms and photos like the back rooms are probably some empty offices or some storage space somewhere so it's probably not reincarnation or something I think considering the amount of fairly common places these photos were taken at it's much more likely most people are just unlocking stowed away memories and while they might not be carbon copies of places they've been they contain enough of the general gist the atmosphere more of the conceptual and less of the literal and through this they instill in us a vague sense of familiarity these are places that we don't make clear in our mind they are ordinary transitional spaces that we don't have time to make mental models of in our brains because at the time they seem unimportant but ultimately necessary these are the journeys between our destinations these kinds of photos I would assume don't require any technical skill to pull off most of them I assume are lit the way the photographer's found them many of them are low quality which in fact adds to this nostalgic sense much like compression artifacts on an old recording so can anyone take a liminal space photo well let's find out get in loser we're gonna go find some liminal spaces so since its kovat time there's a lot of places that we can go to that are print pretty empty this is one such area and we'll see what kind of photos we can get well here's our next location let's use small the city area I'm going to see what kind of stuff I can find here oh yeah this is definitely the kind of thing we are looking for in a liminal space as I expected finding good empty atmospheric locations was the main point of difficulty but as soon as I went to the mall it immediately became clear just how common these types of large vacant spaces are once you eventually find them when it rains it pours these sets of photos may also mostly work on a specific demographic of people like I said if you were born any time during the 90s or 2000s and if you're American now there's been some threads of people who claim they are not American and still feel the same things and there's no reason to doubt this these kinds of places are not totally exclusive to America and they're still American media but I found this interesting post that made me rethink the universality of this appeal in the description the uploader explains how these liminal spaces are of places mostly from a typical American childhood and so as someone who partially grew up in Russia they made a compilation that might appeal more towards a Russian childhood so I watched their video while the photos matched all the same criteria atmospheric lighting lack of people and transitional spaces for the most part I did not feel the same as with the typically American compilation I felt a tinge of Uranus and sadness but not that same nostalgic sting it appears nostalgia for our narrow net of liminal space images is not universal another element should also be considered the power of presentation and suggestion probably gives these images more attention than usual let's face it if these photos were mixed in with all the other stuff from your feed without a caption or any other signal of importance I doubt you'd really give it the attention and thought you would normally but when it's put in a video with the intriguing title pictures that feel strangely familiar but are uncomfortable in a single photo front and center with nothing to distract from it well then that's something you want to pay attention to furthermore if you showed someone these images with no commentary you may not get much of a reaction from them but if you suggest they're familiar this may prompt people to think more deep about their past experiences and connect them to a certain time or place they didn't consider beforehand I wouldn't say it's entirely off the table that some people may be manufacturing false memories merely by suggestion but for me at least there's more to these images than that like I demonstrated before I can connect these images to specific memories and similar looking images from my childhood the most powerful of these images to me is when there is just one or two things off about them and it's never something that is supernatural no ghosts or monsters just little spikes of strangeness that produce this uncanny effect for example take this inaccessible waiting area on the second floor of some hotel a bewildering design for a passageway of narrow cornered walls this long prison-like building with a single lit window this area of infinitely receding walls with windows installed in them for seemingly no apparent reason this underground house with a concrete sky and artificial greenery this storage or office space with such sparse lighting you wonder how anyone could work there I can't even begin to explain this photo this one is just plain weird I don't know why anyone would design these horrifying mouth pillars these bits of weirdness produce anxiety a kind of impending danger that is similar but more powerful to normal liminal space photos not only of most of these environments been taken out of their design context the architecture itself is unnerving if there was a scale from normal images to weird images we have covered on this channel it would start with like a normal average looking photo then these liminal space photos with one or two things off about them then our reader images then finally complete abstraction these liminal space photos are a kind of middle ground between what was already a middle ground between abstraction and normal edited photos are some of the most powerful in the stream like aspect like this room with a strangely photoshopped right window or this flat plane or these copy-and-paste homes scattered haphazardly over sanitized landscapes or this heavily edited supermarket with a road that descends so steeply it's reminiscent of falling in a dream in the realm of traditional painting there's one artist that come to mind whose works resemble liminal spaces John registers paintings of places devoid of people but instead filled with objects like chairs and tables give off similar vibes but are far more comfortable to me probably because they are also filled with sunshine and large windows and don't give off the same nostalgia because they depict aesthetics far before my time but they are still breathtakingly beautiful I'm sure there are other artists I'm simply not aware of that makes similar kinds of artwork so if you know any of them just tell me in the comments if you have spent any time in this community you've probably found a favorite liminal space photo there is one for me as well I first saw it in a compilation put together by the channel float in part two of their strangely familiar places with unnerving music series this photo is utterly paralyzing to me every time I see it it reminds me of being on the road at night during late December gazing at all those homes in obscure locations far away from the city but still celebrating all the same the black void surrounding the house is overpowering in its isolating effects as I stare at those modest decorations I think about the humans who live there probably deep in slumber unbothered by the weather outside people live here I would think people with stories and experiences I'll probably never know this small house is like millions of others doomed to obscurity this is going to sound stupid but over this past summer I've been watching The Office and for the most part I enjoyed it in some places it was maybe a bit more cringe than comedy for my liking but overall enjoyable and for a lot of the time I was watching the setting consisted of tan plain walls and uninspiring architecture and then I realized if you removed all the furniture and office supplies you probably get something similar to one of those back rooms photos and then I realized all those little stories and characters and character quirks while greatly exaggerated exist in real life people worked in these places and now all those people are gone at least within the tiny viewpoint we get from a single photo just like how human beings designed and built these places human beings also lived in them and it's undeniable that they we've dal ittle bit of humanity into them this might have been someone's childhood home or their favorite place to play as a child and when they're gone it's like you can feel a ghost remain a kind of eeriness and sadness these very ordinary places were once full of life full of stories no matter how insignificant stories that may never be told hell without any describable landmarks we don't even know for sure what state some of these could be in or country or place on the planet to take another word from the dictionary of obscure sorrows saunder is the realization that each random passerby is living a life just as vivid and complex as your own I find myself staring at these photos and applying this same realization to man-made places if these walls could talk I know this is all getting very sentimental but for me that's the main point of interest in fact there are efforts by channels like David crypt who also supplied the compilations which introduced me to the subject to try and see if we can get some of these stories to be told for the past few months david crypt has been organizing a task force of sorts to find where the original backrooms photo was taken in fact they've already found the location of a similar image usually associated with the back rooms and it's just an ordinary office space but remember that underground house photo I mentioned earlier it's actually a real photo of an underground 15,000 square foot bunker in Las Vegas that simulates the changes in night and day through artificial lights and an artificial environment with painted murals and fake trees a pool barbecue putting green all of this 26 feet underground it's kind of amazing i down in the search for the back rooms people will find anything close to this kind of anomaly and yet I still have an intense curiosity for its true location these images and emerging culture seem like a new movement of art and that includes everything from the digital edits to the low-quality photos by putting these images into a new context by adding music to accompany the atmosphere by writing poetic comments by analyzing them in meaningful ways people have elevate these ordinary and obscure places to a greater significance and this fascination has become a guiding force to track down and make these places a little less obscure people are starting to rethink the ordinary the unnoticed transitional spaces of our lives the technology of the camera and the internet have made this possible by making these places accessible and collected but it is also the dedicated following that has given significance to the insignificant by taking it out of its design context we are returning to a world as we once saw it through the eyes of a child we don't really know how it works or what it means but we are fascinated by it even the most mundane and ordinary appears new in our eyes the world is confusing and large and mysterious we are anxious from unknown danger and indulge in the simple comforts we don't quite know where we're going and when we'll get there but for now we're on a journey and our destination is full of endless possibilities ultimately these liminal space photos unlock some aspect of that by forcing us to look at something familiar in a new way that's basically what this is all about taking something out of its design context can have powerful effects on our perceptions and what a privilege it is to explore an altered reality [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Solar Sands

Views: 2,782,935

Rating: 4.9595013 out of 5

Keywords: Solar Sands, Liminal Spaces, Atmosphere, Strangely Familiar, Photos, Cerebral, Images that are strangely familiar, Anemoia, Kenopsia, Sonder, Yume Nikki, Creepypasta, Backrooms

Id: N63pQGhvK4M

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mikemachlin]

this video is how i found this sub

[u/CaptainPorkBelly]

I literally saw this subreddit in that video and immediately came to look at this.

[u/Commander_Gene]

Oh shit I just posted this to r/backrooms

[u/CerealSwoops52]

The last image on the video was by me

[u/YellowBunny18]

Solar Sands is one of my favorite youtubers and i'm really glad he made a video promoting this subject, because I really believe that Liminal Space can be turned into art.

[u/PasaW66]

It was actually a really good video! It was funny to see my photo on it from this sub too

[u/[deleted]]

I just saw it and he did a great analysis on them

[u/[deleted]]

Just watched it, all the images scream of 90's and 2000's childhoods left abandoned as we grew up, very fascinating.

[u/iliekcats-]

I found another video like that, first I saw "oddly familiar pictures", then I went on to google how they work and how to make my own, then I finally got a video, and it had subs like r/truebackrooms, r/LiminalSpace etc