I’ve been doing some thinking about liminal spaces for a while – which hey, if you’re looking for a nice rabbit hole to go down, there’s one for you – but I’ll give you the quick version… There have been a lot of spaces described being
liminal (and varying definitions of that term), with evidence presented in still images of a real place, or sometimes video. These tend to be spaces that seem unsettling for some reason, sometimes only in retrospect. And there are a number of creators who have explored liminality through works of fiction – usually in short films or video games – where the audience or player is given a window into one of these disquieting places.
There are many factors that can make a place
feel unsettling: sparse or dated lighting, the geometry of the space, or dim corners where something unknown might lurk. But as strange as these spaces appear, there is a common factor that ties them together… Namely, these are spaces that were clearly created for people but where no people can be seen using them, and this can make otherwise familiar spaces seem uncanny. This could be something like a school after hours, an abandoned apartment building, or an empty parking garage with architecture that seems to be infinitely repeated in every direction.
