Liminal Spaces

The feeling of a liminal space came over me for the first time while working as a computer technician at a company called Hess, which no longer exists. I had to deliver a printer to a school in Waiblingen. It was the summer holidays and the building was completely deserted. A vast school auditorium, empty of students, teachers, and staff. The architecture from the eighties made such a powerful impression on me that I never forgot that feeling.

It was only later that I learned there is a name for it: liminal spaces.

The most well-known example of liminal spaces is the Backrooms. Entire websites fill up with stories about the Backrooms and their levels. The Backrooms originated from a photograph of a hardware store somewhere in America.

The feeling is best described as a sense of displacement. Combined with the sensation of entering somewhere forbidden, yet somehow familiar. A strange blend of emotions. A blend that, as I have come to understand, not everyone is able to experience.

The next time I felt it was when I came across Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" from 1818, by chance, in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The painting almost pulled me inside it. Liminal spaces are usually devoid of any human presence, but it was a similar feeling nonetheless. The wanderer was what made the space and the sheer dimensions of the sea of fog tangible to me.

Then the same feeling again, standing in front of a painting at MoMA in New York. "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth from 1948, showing only the back and the back of the head of a paralyzed girl in a cornfield. Perhaps it has something to do with not being able to see the faces of the protagonists.

Another time I experienced the feeling of a liminal space after the Tokyo Game Show in 2025, in a hotel west of Tokyo Bay, where I had the entire sixth floor to myself. A certain scenario reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Over three days of recovery at the hotel, I did not see a single other person on my floor, which had more than fifty rooms. At the same time, an immense contrast after spending four days in Shinjuku, one of the most densely populated places on earth.

The last time was just two days ago, on my way to Liberec in the Czech Republic. I was driving through the border triangle between the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany on country roads, with not a single car passing me for half an hour in pouring rain. The aggressive open-cast mining in the area has already distorted the landscape in a strange way, which only added to it.

There are even films now that pick up the themes of liminal spaces and the Backrooms. It has also become its own sub-genre of indie horror games.

In the future, I want to do something with liminal spaces myself. Art, or a computer game.