Liminal Spaces And The Uncomfortable Kind Of Familiarity

The Liminal Space Reddit sub-thread has some excellent pictures of liminal spaces: ferries with no passengers, uninhabited rooms furnished with old-timey furniture, emptied residential streets, architecture that's oddly symmetrical, bizarrely placed doors and rooms, etc. There's something sad and surreal about these photos, and undeniably off-putting. 

It can be hard to pinpoint why such photos are off-putting. IFL Science points out that sensations of discomfort might have to do with what's been coined "the uncanny valley" effect. The uncanny valley is the sense of repugnance felt when encountering something close to human but not quite, or close to real but not quite. Anyone who's ever been creeped out by a mannequin, for example, should have no problem understanding this experience. Mannequins look human enough in general form but aren't convincingly human enough to not seem creepy. Similarly, some people feel disturbed by the herky-jerky, obviously artificial appearance of rubber-skinned androids like the semi-famous Sophia, whom Tech Xplore discusses. An artificial construct like Data from "Star Trek: The Generation," on the other hand, doesn't evoke those kinds of responses because he comes across as truly human. 

Liminal spaces produce the same kind of response for the same reason. Unused shopping malls and abandoned hospitals are close enough to real, like mannequins, but not real enough. They're more like movie sets than lived-in places full of normal activity. In this way, as The Atlantic describes, liminal spaces are familiar but uncomfortable. Or put differently, they're comfortable places made unfamiliar.

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