weird web

.An Intro to Liminality

What is Liminality? If you were to simply google the term several different definitions would pop up, however the basis of "liminality" in its original form describes a transitional period. As opposed to the modernized versions of liminality that have become popularized in recent years, liminality applies to a physical space, mental state or timeframe.

.A Brief History

The concept of liminality came into the public's focus during 1909 when Arnold van Gennep published his book "The Rites of Passage" where he wrote about the social and cultural ceremonies that an individual may go through during their life. Within his writing, Gennep breaks down these periods into "preliminary", "liminality" and "post-liminality".

.The Popularization of Liminality

Liminality caught the interest of the internet during the late 2010s when an image posted on 4chan was posted depicting the famous Backroom photo. Originally captioned with a request for others to share similarly unsettling or off-putting images, the thread was derailed by another user captioning it with the following:

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"

This post sparked the beginning of endless levels of "backrooms". While these originally started as true liminal spaces, with level 0 being an endless collection of hallways, the lore behind the backrooms slowly descended out of pure liminality. Relying more heavily on additions of entities that could spawn at random in differing levels, the focus moved away from the space itself. Containing hundreds of levels, the concept was soon an internet-wide sensation, with anyone contributing to the content.

Only in recent years has the trend of liminal spaces come full circle back towards its original definition. Much of the content for liminality is saturated with stereotypical horror tropes, most of it being pretty much the same idea just replicated over and over, and it seems that many of them have been or are starting to be dropped from the concept.

There is also the parallel to liminal space, which are collections of nostalgic images or experiences ranging from the late 90s to the early 2010s. Though not purely liminal spaces, the consensus is that, for many internet users, seeing spaces from their childhood evokes a similar feeling to how many people express about liminal spaces. Prominent on platforms such as TikTok, Youtube and Instagram, this branch of content overlaps quite often with the liminality circle online.