Liminal Spaces
Today I’d like to discuss the concept of liminal spaces because I currently find myself in one and I can’t help but think that so do many others.
Ironically, in speaking of liminal spaces, I am not discussing anything related to home decor. I am addressing more of a psychological space.
A liminal space can be defined as a space that is transitional - whether it is physical, emotional, or metaphorical. Liminal spaces are the in-between places where one thing ends and another begins. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word limen, which means ‘threshold.’
Physical examples of liminal spaces can include empty parking lots, empty hallways, empty stairwells, and abandoned shopping malls. Liminal spaces often seem eerie and haunted.
You get the idea.
There can also be considered levels of “liminality.” For instance, I have placed these pictures in order from seemingly those most liminal to those least liminal, and the reason I have chosen the last few as least liminal is because, ostensibly, we know that the church will fill up on a Sunday, that we’ll make it above ground from the subway station, and that we’ll eventually find our hotel room.
Liminality is also a concept in the world of anthropology and speaks to a culture’s passage into a new paradigm.
According to Wikipedia, anthropologists have long used the term to explain the “sense of ambiguity and/or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage” among various tribes that they study.
The concept of liminality has also been adopted to describe political and cultural change, where “social hierarchies may be reversed, or temporarily dissolved of tradition, may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.”
COVID-19 created such a liminal space and, as we have progressed through it, we have progressed through levels of liminality as we’ve grappled with our understanding of it, figured out how to deal with it, transformed our lives to accommodate it, attempted to defeat it, and rebuilt our world in the wake of its devastation.
As well, it could be stated that the current, most recent election in the United States has sent about half its populace into a liminal world where they are unsure of what comes next. Add to that the fact that they also have to grapple with the other half of the populace being so angrily confident in their conviction that nothing short of redemption is at hand,
The concept of cultural liminality can also be used to discuss this age of AI where tech bros “move fast and break things” (sigh). With AI, we are in a space where we know not what it will wrought. Corporatists, lazy people, and men in search of an identity rabidly laud its capabilities and wax messianic about how it will improve our world. Those whose livelihoods it threatens to replace, the artists (the soul of humanity), and those who worry about the vast resources it promises to extract from Mother Earth, are not so thrilled
This all brings me to the very liminal space, artistically speaking, where I find myself. If you have read my blog at all, it will come as no surprise that I am anti-AI.
Immediately after I started posting my art to Instagram in 2022, because I was told I absolutely had to if I wanted to gain art commissions, AI really reared it’s ugly head. Then in late June of this year (2024), meta announced that not only had they likely already been doing so, but that they were going to “legally” begin scraping everything that was posted to any of their sites - with no option in the US to opt out (because, you know, having had the misfortune of being born into the megolithic corporatocracy that is the USA, we are all somehow fodder for the machine.)
In addition to the problems with AI, one can add the fact that nobody is getting any reach on Instagram anymore unless they’re naked. This morning I saw a post on threads where a woman claimed that when she posted her newest piece of art on IG and got no views, she felt forced to take it down. I took a look at her Instagram profile and saw that she has over 40,000 followers. What hope does that leave those of us with 85 followers like myself? For awhile now, I’ve known that the answer to that question is “no hope at all.”
After meta made its announcement, I turned my Instagram profile private. Frankly, I was entirely shocked by how few artists did the same. I figured that either they didn’t care, or that they’ve been on IG for so long continuously, having ten years’ worth of art and contacts, that they were not about to give that up (despite the fact that their art will be stolen and fed into a machine so that the talentless can push a button to create art based upon their hard-won style, to compete with them directly at a fraction of the cost, in addition to allowing that same machine to suck Mother Nature dry.)
So, after a month or so, I hit upon the idea of unprivating my account and just posting home decor mockups of the abstract art that I created, you know, about 15 years ago, while continuing to create new illustrations in private, in the dark, and off the web.
The posting of home decor mockups is not quite as fun as posting new work and getting appreciation for it. So, I have thought of various ways of being able to post my new illustrations while not having them so readily available for copying.
I realize that watermarking is extremely old-fashioned and hardly foolproof. There are even YouTube videos on how to remove watermarks from art. I then thought of posting my art at a really distant and/or oblique angle, and at such low resolution that it might be considered garbage by AI programs, but this is likely child’s play for them. And, because I live in a van, I don’t have a desktop computer and therefore cannot proceed to Glaze and Nightshade my work either.
A few examples of things that I have thought of doing:
An array so tiny, AI might not bother. Yet, how unaesthetically-pleasing is ithis?
Small, oblique, and with shadows.
Shadows and light.
Oblique, with part of the composition cut off.
Hands blocking part of the composition.
Ultimately, what I have decided to do is to incorporate all of it in each post: low resolution, oblique angles, shadows, objects like hands and arms blocking the composition, only partially showing the composition, and then throwing a watermark on top to cover part of the composition.
Anyone interested in my art on a professional level will just have to understand that this is what I’m doing to protect my new work from being stolen.
Until all of this nonsense gets sorted out, I and other anti-AI artists will have to wait in the dystopian meantime, in a liminal interlude of unknown duration, for the advent of new and better ways to showcase our human-made art which was forged in the fiery cross-section between hard-learned skill and the passage of precious time.
Until then, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.