Liminal Spaces. Love Them or Hate Them?

[Mariposa Electrique]

Think old or abandoned hospitals
Super Mario 64

 

[Open Window Maniac]

I think they're interesting. They definitely can be creepy; all that empty space gets in your head and makes you see and hear stuff not there. Makes you feel alone. They're great if you want to induce anxiety and paranoia.

 

[Plastic Love]

They're fun because they're creepy but in a subtle way. There's no monster or threat and it's all psychological.

Not to sperg but I enjoyed this play through of liminal source maps

 

[Kaktus Kompot]

They're definitely interesting. They're not exactly scary to me, but still fascinating due to their weird uncanny valley effect, like something you'd capture on an old film camera in your dream. I guess they create this effect by combining feelings of wrongness and emptiness with a kind of coziness and nostalgia.

 

[Itachi Uchiha]

I like the idea of them as well as the subtlness. Things that are only subtly creepy and not in your face are the best kind of creepy imo. I will say however that it annoys me when people get all freaked out over pictures saying how familiar some of them feel and how weird that is. Like bro it's a picture of an empty grocery store I'm pretty sure you've been to a grocery store before, no shit it feels familiar.

 

[Pee Cola]

Any location that was once very busy can feel kinda eerie once abandoned. I guess some people might find an abandoned hospital a bit more eerie than say an abandoned factory or mall. I think such places are pretty cool.

 

[lemme ASS you a question]

Its boring as shit and in vidya games comes across as an incomplete map by an incompetent game designer. Its like playing a multiplayer match with only you online, its boring and lame. Only in games like LSD dream emulator does it work and thats only because of the dynamic environment.

in real life its creepy and unsettling, especially if the building itself is away is rural but it never translates well at all in any media and its just lazy and low budget.

 

[Finder]

I don't get it at all, or how people are creeped out by them. It's literally just large, empty buildings/spaces.

 

[What the shit]

I don't get it at all, or how people are creeped out by them. It's literally just large, empty buildings/spaces.

Right, and large, empty buildings/spaces gives your mind plenty of thought and feelings.

 

[Finder]

Right, and large, empty buildings/spaces gives your mind plenty of thought and feelings.

Maybe for some people. I walk into an empty building and I don't think twice about it.

 

[Coolio55]

I like them because they perfectly resemble my dreams.

 

[Mal0]

As a teen in the midwest, there was nothing for my friends and I to do besides drugs or random shit. So to pass our time, we would regularly go into a nearby abandoned mall. Just spend hours upon hours wandering around the empty halls. Seeing liminal spaces reminds me of walking around those shopping centers, the back loading areas, et cetera.

So I love them due to the nostalgia I had for those areas.

 

[Least Concern]

I like 'em, or seeing pictures of them at least.

• Little to no decoration; everything is functional
• Artificial yet insufficient lighting
• No plants or animals; any humans are far in the distance and/or indistinguishable; but that the place exists means it must have been used by humans at some point, right?
• Flat colors or tightly-repeating patterns, possibly with some defect or variation (light switches on flat-painted walls, crooked tiles, etc.)

However, I have some pretty bad memories associated with actually being in places that looked like this that I won't share. It can all be pretty evocative.

I think airports, late at night, are a great example of this. If you're at an airport at like 3:00 AM and there's not so many people around and you're wandering around because you're killing time before a flight, and all the shops are closed and you can go off into some of the lesser-used wings of the airport, they'll look so empty and abandoned and hopeless, and without the din of a crowd you hear the droning of the HVAC systems and the rolling-clunking of the people-movers and escalators and maybe a brief burst of laughter echoes through the halls or from behind a doorway threatening arrest if you pass through it, and you notice that the ceiling is so high - why are airport ceilings always so much higher than they need to be? - and you'll feel like you're not supposed to be there even though it's not technically off-limits.

There's actually a related music genre called weirdcore/dreamcore. Sort of related to vaporwave in that it's often chopped up versions of existing songs, but done in a way to feel more unsettling than nostalgic. Search it on YouTube for some playlists to listen to while looking at these pictures.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I like them because they perfectly resemble my dreams.

Holy crap I thought I was the only one to have dreams about weird places and architecture and shit like that.

 

[Cool kitties club]

Liminal spaces seem more sad or interesting then scary to me. Once as a Kid i just randomly went on the elevator in a hospital to an empty classroom wing and just kinda walked around and saw all the empty tables till my mom found me. Just find it funny how the scariest thing to zoomers is an empty room.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Also to answer the actual question... I actually think they're extremely cool. I don't know why anybody would be scared of them. If I had a way to do it legally, I'd love to go on a solo night expedition to some abandoned place like that.

 

[Synthetic Smug]

They're interesting because they seem like incomplete patterns that invite your mind to finish them.

 

[Mariposa Electrique]

They're definitely interesting. They're not exactly scary to me, but still fascinating due to their weird uncanny valley effect, like something you'd capture on an old film camera in your dream. I guess they create this effect by combining feelings of wrongness and emptiness with a kind of coziness and nostalgia.

I don't know if it's me, but I've always dreamt in weird liminal spaces. Sometimes, they've felt like impossible memories. Like they just came from nowehere.

However, I have some pretty bad memories associated with actually being in places that looked like this that I won't share. It can all be pretty evocative.

Hell, yes, I used to work in a big old hospital in Germany for a year. The hospital had 4+ towers , 3 of which were shut down due to minor construction, but were still functional for education purposes. It was extremely liminal and spooky. A friend and I who traveled together for work got trapped in the basement one day and found 15 homeless people living down there. That was the day we quit and went home.

Holy crap I thought I was the only one to have dreams about weird places and architecture and shit like that.

Right, the brain is strange.

 

[Cats]

If I was a ghost, I would pick an airport or a post office to haunt. So I guess that means I like these places. I didn't know there was some weird autistickey category for them though (kind of like how some people use ASMR instead of just saying "sounds".) I'm not a ghost yet, but hopefully will be some day.

 

[Kaktus Kompot]

I feel that's worthy to add to the thread: I remember when my friends invited me to hang out in a hobby shop located in an old Palace of Culture - a large Soviet multipurpose building combining things like theaters, libraries and studios, that's still functional now but with some sections repurposed into offices or shops. So, I got lost on the way to the meetup and for a while wandered around through empty corridors with unmarked old doors and large mosaic-decorated halls, went though a large printing house, walked up dusty stairs to the roof which were illuminated only by a ceiling window (unfortunately, roof door was closed) and somehow entered a small historical museum through a back door and walked around it with no one stopping me. The experience was definitely amplified by barely-changed and very distinct Soviet architecture and interior design that I have a nostalgic soft spot for. All in all, great experience with liminal spaces, would do again.