Technophobia Euphoria

It matters that we resist.

The concept of liminality, as it seems to be have taken up in the arts and popularised online, is an odd adaptation of a concept used in early 20th century sociology (by Arnold von Gennep), which gives a phenomenological reading of the psychology underlying rites of passage. People use the term to read the qualities of physical spaces in much the same way as the emotional or psychological transitional spaces between life stages; i.e. the discomfort and sense of alienation and placelessness you experience in adolescence is analogous to the unease you experience walking through an empty pedestrian subway.

What I find offputting in the use of this term to refer to artistic depictions (or just recontextualisations) of abandoned houses, public thoroughfares, or generally any of the various physical spaces that feel vaguely unpleasant and uncannily opposed to human inhabitation, is that the framework it provides for looking at these spaces is one that reduces them to the sense of unease and unfamiliarity experienced by individuals. You find an image of a space that feels strange and unsettling in some way - i.e. a space, like the floor of an office building filled with cubicles but empty of people, which in some vague sense doesn’t match up with your expectations of its regular use. By describing it as liminal, those immediate (and unexamined) emotions become the defining qualities of the space depicted. In reality, those spaces have an independent existence from your presence within them, or your second-hand observation of them. I think the sense of unease and discomfort that people describe as liminality is actually the sudden awareness of the indifference of the real world, in sharp contrast to its heavily tailored (and targeted) standard depiction, geared to validate your own preconceptions (which I think is an innate property of advertising and commercial imagery generally). 

In the context of real estate imagery, to me at least, this unfamiliarity and unsettlingness should act as a window into the broader world that transcends the flattening and superficiality of the institutional context of the image. In art language, something closer to the sublime seems to fit - the sudden awareness of vast, unknown, terrifying horizons upon ascending a precipice, like those seen by Casper David Friedrich’s wanderer. Maybe an embarrassingly nerdy example, but for me it’s a feeling similar to doing (actual, non-AI) research in a library, wandering the stacks in search of a book and being distracted by other books in the same section, becoming aware of immense new horizons of knowledge and thought, and being humbled by the the sudden awareness that your own concerns occupy a tiny island within the whole. There’s a spectrum of emotions that this can provoke, but one is definitely fear. People have a range of ways of responding to fear, but I think there’s a shared experience of wanting to develop structured responses to exploring it, maybe as a deeply primal way of fulfilling our own curiosity. There are plenty of movies where this is used as a plot device. I think this explains a large part of the popularity of true crime.

I think we are bombarded with an increasing amount of commercialised flattening in the way we’re encouraged to see the real world through visual media. Generative AI seems to be the distilled essence of this; everything it regurgitates is the statistical average of the immense amounts of data that’s uncritically fed into it. There seems to be a major problem with generative AI platforms encouraging psychosis in vulnerable users by reflecting their delusions back at them; like its innate structural property of making the real world unobjectionable has the the effect of bending reality in a way that actively harms people. I think people know, at some level, that there are serious issues in the world, and they want to understand them. At the micro-level, seeing visual evidence of the actual blood and guts dysfunction of the housing market can be very appealing when for 95% of the time you see it represented in an idealised form that’s transparently fake (and harmful). Deadvertising is just a framework for approaching art in a world in which the vast majority of visual imagery produced comes from advertising, or a related industry (i.e. commercial design). It involves recognising that there are fundamental institutional properties of advertising that flatten conceptual depth and emotional experience in the service of an artificially friction-less appeal to fake, shared ideas of what is normal. In much the same way as the productive capacity of a society can be misallocated by, for instance, sending qualified tradespeople to work on oil and gas projects that will destroy the global climate and draining the residential construction sector in the middle of a housing crisis, an enormous amount of creative talent is wasted in the production of visual ephemera that represent the world as simpler than it actually is and which make audiences less critical than they ought to be.