Their description of Frutiger Aero explicitly includes Aqua, both mentioned by name and included visually:
https://www.are.na/consumer-aesthetics-research-institute/fr...
It was the lowest point of computer graphics. Who the hell is nostalgic for that? Probably just kids that had their formative years in those ~2-3 years. Not sure you can even call it a niche.
I’m a fan on the vaporwave/Windows 2000/XP aesthetic, the Vista era is when everything started going to shit.
In this case, I imagine it's submarine marketing for the movie that's out.
I think that aesthetic follows a natural progression from creepypasta[2], mixed with some nostalgia for the eeriness playing Resident Evil-type of games as a kid, the satisfying feeling to watch empires collapse, going nowhere yet being nowhere, and the constant desire of the internet to long for niche cultures.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wAo54DHDY0
Liminal in the context of liminal dreaming has very different emotional connotations. Liminal dreaming is the state where you are beginning to fall asleep but are not quite there (hence liminal because you're on the border between awake and asleep). You can also experience it at the end of a sleep as you transition back into being awake. It's a flowing place where colors, shapes, and sounds keep morphing in very interesting and often beautiful ways. Unlike lucid dreaming there is no notion of being in control. Supposedly this was a secret to the creativity of Dali. He would sit in a chair with some keys in his hand and allow himself to drift off. When he fell asleep the keys would fall out of his hand, hit the floor, and the sound would wake him up. Then he would draw whatever he had been imagining during the liminal dreaming right there on the spot. Edison supposedly also had a similar trick. Supposedly. I have sometimes imagined some really beautiful (and catchy!) music but I've never been able to remember it in detail after waking.
The proper term is hypnagogia.
Studies showed better math solving after hypnogagia state: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8654287/ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj5866
A historical European town devoid of people does not work as a liminal space picture at all, because it still looks nice; and neither do the postapocalyptic settings that Japan is so fond of (YKK etc.). Eastern European commieblock and UK Brutalist hellscapes are actually quite similar in terms of the feeling they evoke, and have their own fandoms, but are considered their own genre - so I would conclude that "liminal space porn" is spaces only made tolerable by commercialism with the commercialism taken away, and the related "/r/UrbanHell" material is spaces only made tolerable by human habitation with that taken away or suppressed (e.g. if the humans are so bereft of vitality that they can no longer overcome the space's badness).
I'd like to put extra emphasis on this "swallows": It's not just that a location is generating eerie mimics, like the output hopper of an eldritch factory. The space uses mimicry to attract, surround, and swallow people. We are like insects who cannot quite comprehend the pitcher-plant. The terror and dread comes from an unhappy-medium of partial understanding.
Through that lens, we can see a lot of rather low-hanging-fruit for further comparisons to "late-stage capitalism" or other obtuse and soulless systems we can't avoid.
> It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled
I've occasionally opined that claiming we've invented thinking-machines is hubris, but we may have made dreaming-machines.
I see parallels between prompt injection causing an LLM to jump the rails and start telling an entirely different story, and how dreams [0] often have discontinuities that only seem odd in hindsight.
______
[0] Or at any rate, our after-the-fact memories of a dream, which may themselves be unreliable or fabricated rather than a true record of a past experience.
Very intense memories of going there with my grandparents as a little kid, riding the holiday train, seeing Santa, etc. Even met the handyman from Mr Rogers Neighborhood one time!
Ah, the 80s.
Did not call it the aesthetic of our time since the term was first used for post world war I economies.
We must be in late-to-its-own-funeral capitalism.
https://onthearts.com/p/what-are-liminal-spaces-and-why-are
I don’t think it’s as directly attributable to “late capitalism,” as the article suggests. I speculated on a few ideas:
- We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals - Nostalgia - Our Cities are Transportation Networks - Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal - The Death of God - We Lack a Process-Oriented Language
Anyway you might find it interesting!
This stuff is maybe more liminal: https://x.com/PenguinWeb3/status/2063196355011424582?s=20
But, I would actually beg, to not let those who indulge in high art language colonise "art" as well. Art is for you and me, everyone. twats writing bollocks is for the "elite"
Art history is a mixed bag, it is also for all of us, even if it tedious.
This is not the language of an elitist.
If anything, it sounds like someone defending Liminalism's inclusion in the contemporary canon from arrogant elitists.
Are we really supposed to take seriously that “liminalism is the defining aesthetic of our time”?
> This is not the language of an elitist.
It absolutely is. Someone claiming to tell you what is “important”, what is “truly democratic”, in contradiction to “traditional” structures is elitism at its most insufferable.