A Long Strange Dream
Embracing the Liminal
Active Materials is a newsletter by Jordan Willis for creative strategists exploring the intersections of art, culture, and technology. Browse the archive to dive deeper.
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Into the Backrooms
At the end of this month, A24 will release Backrooms, a new sci-fi horror film directed by Kane Parsons, based on a fandom that spawned from a single photograph posted to 4chan depicting a seemingly endless, surreal maze of empty, yellow-tinted rooms.
The release of the movie, alongside other recent horror films like Exit 8, featuring a looping subway corridor, marks a peak in mainstream pop culture for ‘liminal space’ aesthetics. Defining this aesthetic seems to be a common theme of being lost, abandoned, or trapped in systems beyond our control.
Liminality, as a concept in anthropology, is all about the disorientation that happens during the middle stage of a rite of passage, akin to how ‘twilight’ serves as a ‘liminal’ time between day and night, or how many digital spaces operate in a zone outside of physical reality. This place feels like a threshold between one form and another.
Why is liminality hitting a nerve for us right now?
And why are we about to feel a whole lot more of it?
The Liminal Blob
As the great slopification continues to take over our feeds, brands and colleagues alike increasingly integrate AI into their communication voices, and it seems we’re increasingly living through this in-between period where a lot of our surroundings are increasingly morphing into some homogenous liminal blob, where we’re unsure of what’s real and what isn’t.
There’s the uncanny valley that’s visible (AI that is obviously AI), but there’s also an eerie feeling that soon we may not be able to distinguish either.
One recent example that I’ve seen some discourse around is global strategy and design agency Porto Rocha’s creation of a hypothetical brand using only AI - YoYoYo. This was done to demonstrate Google DeepMind’s capabilities. Everything from product design to visual identity was done together with Nano Banana, and the tech is impressive.
However, scrolling through YoYoYo’s webpage amplifies the emotional resonance of liminality, a feeling of in-betweenness arises when you look at something so polished yet knowingly know it’s all AI-generated. It can be disorientating.
A Dark Forest
The increasing prevalence of AI and the resulting sense of liminality can be understood through the lens of the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Proposed by Bogna Konior, the theory suggests that as the internet becomes vaster and more complex, it also becomes more difficult to understand and navigate. Just as a dark forest is filled with unknown dangers and hidden paths, the internet is becoming a place where it’s hard to know what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s lurking beyond our perception.
In this dark forest, AI-generated content like the future of YoYoYo-like brands is just one of many unknowns. As we encounter more of this type of content, our sense of reality becomes destabilised. We’re left wondering not just what’s real and what’s fake, but also what the implications are for our understanding of creativity, authenticity, and human expression.
The Dark Forest Theory also suggests that as the internet becomes more opaque, people will increasingly retreat into private spaces and smaller communities. In the context of liminality, this could be seen as a way of coping with the disorientation and uncertainty of the current moment. By seeking out familiar spaces and like-minded individuals, we try to create a sense of stability in a world that feels increasingly in-between.
The Horror of the Backrooms
The feelings of being lost, abandoned, or trapped that the Backrooms evoke are analogous to the experience of navigating an online world that is increasingly shaped by AI and other unknown forces.
In a recent A24 podcast conversation between horror director James Wan and Kane Parsons (director of Backrooms), Kane touches on one of the main anxieties that the film is reacting to:
“the pervasive fear that with all the resources we have… it’s starting to mean less... and in a way, the human race is starting to role-play itself.”
In this sense, the Backrooms can be seen as both a symptom of and a response to the disorienting effects of the dark forest.
More Liminal Please
In his book ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, Mark Fisher argues that these two modes, while often associated with horror, are not necessarily frightening in themselves. Rather, they are unsettling precisely because they confront us with the outside and the unknown – the things that lie beyond our familiar categories and frameworks of meanings.
Fisher suggests that engaging with the weird and the eerie may be essential to a fuller understanding of the human condition, as it challenges us to grapple with the liminal and the uncanny aspects of our existence.
Seen through this lens, the Backrooms and other liminal aesthetics take on a new significance. They are not just reflections of our anxieties about the dark forest of the internet or the increasing prevalence of AI, but fundamentally about the human relationship of the unknown. The feelings of disorientation, unease, and fascination that they evoke are not simply reactions to specific cultural or technological developments, but expressions of a deeper existential condition.
From a brand strategy perspective, this suggests that the power of liminal aesthetics lies not just in their ability to capture current cultural anxieties but in their capacity to tap into more timeless and universal human experiences. By engaging with the weird and the eerie, by creating spaces and experiences that confront us with the outside and the unknown, brands can create a deeper resonance and connection with their audiences.
In an age of increasing uncertainty and flux, there may be a growing hunger for brands that are willing to embrace the liminal and the uncanny, to provide spaces of exploration and meaning-making in a world that often feels fragmented and disorienting.
Your Curiosity Means a Lot
Active Materials exists to build a community of curious individuals, people open to new ways of seeing, making, and understanding the world. Learn more about us here. In the archive, you can find other ideas to explore.
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