Backrooms and liminal spaces

welcome home.

This page is dedicated to liminal spaces. Liminal spaces defined by google and wikipedia as a place of "transition" which is a strange and difficult definiion. You might not know what it means until you take a look of some images yourself. Liminal images make you feel nostaglic, familiar, but also uneasy, because how can you feel nostaglic for something you've never really experienced? Liminal images are always empty, with the exception of a monster (but those images are better classified as 'weirdcore')

The "transition" in the definition is better explained as being in the middle stage, or between something. That something can be, one area to another (hallways), one time period to another (this is why images from your adolescent, ball pits, classrooms, can be liminal spaces). Emptiness is almost always expected from liminal spaces because somewhere meaning empty means you don't know anything about the place you're in, and can only rely on your own experiences. Emptiness removes context, which leaves you in between understanding.

The image to the left is of backrooms Level 11, a very simple liminal space that shows an empty city. The transition here is the 'betweeness' of it's existence and purpose, a large, constructed city, with no one in it: it's purpose is lost. Backrooms level 11 is one of my favorite levels because in the backrooms canon/lore, you are supposed to be outside of reality. So seeing an empty city just looks wrong: like the backrooms is trying to replicate reality, but doing it incorrectly.

This image here, and the one in the background are some of my favorite liminal images. These towns are familar and grassy green hills are familar to everyone because grassy green fields exist everywhere in the world. But for me, every time I see grassy green hills with houses like these it makes me feel uncanny because of books that I've read before in elementary school, usually old-style Post-american revolution books that depict barns on beautiful grassy fields. But besides that, I love blue-skies-house-on-green-hill images like this because they look so fake: they lack detail in a way that leaves the world to our imagination, and since we're already in the uncanny valley, we naturally expect the worse.