Tanvi Vidyala, Week 14: Liminal Space

 

About a year ago I was browsing through YouTube when I came across a video on my recommended titled “strangely familiar places with unnerving music.” I ended up clicking on it to be greeted with discordant chords of synth music alongside images of empty stairwells, airports, parking lots, and rooms full of toys and other trinkets of childhood. All the images a sense of familiarity as the title foresaw but also brought forth a sense of something being very off. It was not quite terrifying, but left me uneasy and questioning why these images provoked such a response. 

I looked into it more, learning that such sites were called “liminal spaces.” A liminal space in an anthropological sense is a period of transition in a person’s life between one event and another. Think of it as almost a purgatory, ambiguous and disorienting. I think one liminal space in all of our lives was the period between March 2020 and August 2020 in early quarantine. It was by far the oddest transition all of us have had to make from living our normal lives to staying inside all of the time and attending school via zoom. In a physical sense however, a liminal space is a place in transition such as a train station in the middle of the night when no one is around. It is transitioning between one busy day and the next.

One theory for why these images are so unnerving is the fact that they are often pictures of spaces where people should be but aren’t. Images of liminal spaces tend to be man-made places like school hallways and rooms in houses that are usually full of life. But in the picture there is no one there, so it feels somewhat out of place and almost unfinished because there are no people in it. You feel utterly trapped and the stimulus triggers autophobia; a fear of being alone where you aren’t supposed to be. The style of photography is also something that adds to the eeriness of this phenomenon. The odd late 80s, 90s, and 2000s imagery taken by old cameras with the flash on bounce off the often young viewer, triggering their childhood nostalgia.

If I could compare this feeling to any particular phenomenon it would be to the “uncanny valley” feeling of dread. Have you ever seen half-baked CGI of a human that the artists intended to make realistic but failed miserably? Or possibly a human-like robot that seems horribly creepy due to its almost-but-not-quite human actions and appearance? In this situation the brain senses danger due to something about these human-posing imposters (haha)  seeming slightly off and invokes a fear response. Similarly with liminal spaces, people see a picture that is almost right but is missing something integral. Hence the brain is wired to create a similar fear-response in this instance as well. 

I hope more reliable studies are done on how the brain processes “creepy” things. Until then I will continue to watch these videos and stay up at night wondering why I find a empty room so scary.