AI-GEN
An aesthetic with no period. It refers to no decade, no country and no product line — only to a place you are sure you have been.
Liminal space is the aesthetic of ordinary transitional architecture — corridors, stairwells, car parks, pools — photographed or rendered with nobody in it.
| Period | none. It does not point at a decade. |
| Coined | the word was borrowed. Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage, 1909. |
| Power | none. Nobody is in charge, because nobody is there. |
| Materials | ceiling tile, fluorescent tube, carpet, glazed tile, chlorinated water, an illuminated exit sign |
| Palette | institutional pale, fluorescent green-white, chlorine teal, one red sign |
| Places | corridors, stairwells, multi-storey car parks, swimming baths, arcades, a school at night |
Arnold van Gennep introduced liminality in Les rites de passage in 1909. In anthropology it describes a person in the middle of a rite of passage: no longer their old status, not yet their new one. The word is about a human being, suspended between two social positions.
The internet moved it onto rooms. And then it loosened further: online use is broader and does not always refer to spaces that are literally transitional at all. A corridor qualifies. So does a swimming pool, which is a destination.
So the term now describes a quality of a photograph rather than a function of a building.
On the paranormal board of 4chan, someone asked others to post disquieting images that just feel "off". Another user replied with a description that began: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms..."
That is the founding text of the Backrooms. It has no author. It was one anonymous reply in one thread, and everything since — the levels, the entities, the numbered survival guides, the films — was written on top of it by people who did not know each other.
The image posted with that thread is a real photograph. It was taken on 12 June 2002, in a former furniture store at 807 Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during a renovation. It was put online on 2 March 2003, on the renovation blog of the hobby shop that was moving in.
Nobody knew that for five years. A community on Discord identified it in May 2024 by working backwards through the Wayback Machine. The room is now a track for radio-controlled cars.
Which means the yellow room reproduced here, and every other yellow room in circulation, is a copy. The original is a snapshot of a building site, taken by somebody documenting a shop fit-out, and it cannot be reproduced freely. An aesthetic made entirely of recreations has a first image that almost nobody has actually seen.
The aesthetic had been circulating on 4chan, Reddit and Tumblr through 2019. In March 2020 it stopped being a genre.
Lockdowns emptied public space, and photographs of unusually empty familiar places went everywhere at once. The picture below of Paradise Street was taken at 12:37 in the afternoon on 1 April 2020. It is a shopping street at lunchtime with nobody on it.
For about two months, the entire world could be photographed in this style without any staging at all. No other internet aesthetic has a moment like that — a date on which reality supplied the material.
Jared Pike began posting a series of 3D renderings called Dream Pools in 2020: endless tiled halls half filled with lukewarm water. He has said the project came out of an interest in vaporwave and liminal aesthetics.
Internet users then adapted the pools into the Backrooms, where they became Level 37 — described in the lore as an expansive complex of interconnected rooms and corridors submerged in undulating, lukewarm water.
So a signed body of work by a named artist was taken into an anonymous mythology and given a number. This is worth naming precisely, because it runs the opposite way from the usual case. Ordinarily a person coins a word and an anonymous crowd carries the pictures somewhere the coiner never meant. Here the crowd made the myth first, and then absorbed an author into it.
There is a word for the feeling this produces: anemoia, a longing for a time or a place you have never experienced.
The mechanism is stated plainly in the reference literature. Familiar visual cues invite the viewer to recall or project comparable experiences onto a scene that has no context of its own. The rooms are chosen from the stock of ordinary institutional interiors almost everybody passes through — school corridors, municipal pools, shopping arcades — and then emptied. What arrives is nostalgia, sadness, comfort or unease, and the viewer supplies the memory.
Two neighbouring aesthetics were forming in the same years and on the same platforms. Dreamcore's imagery traces to 2018, on Tumblr and on the same 4chan board, though the word was not used until the early 2020s; it aims at comfort and familiarity. Weirdcore, popularised in the early 2020s, aims at confusion and alienation, and marks its images with red text, blacked-out boxes, eyes and shadow figures. All three use the same trick of the empty familiar room, at three different temperatures.
Every other kind of nostalgia points at something that happened. This one points at a corridor that was never anywhere, and the pointing works.