Liminal Spaces and Frutiger Aero: My Keys to Forgotten Nostalgia

Something I actually like for being off-putting? Bet you’ll never guess what I’ll be bringing up here!

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Frightening imagery
- Political topics
- Mentions of abuse and trauma
- Bad language

A Nice, Long Break...
Exhibit A: All Those Soothing Nightmares
Exhibit B: A Brighter Future and a Better Life
The Great Escape
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A Nice, Long Break…

Well, I must say, I am terribly sorry for the massive delay. Well beyond the range of the major revisions and milestones with my countless art and writing projects (expect to hear about those soon), it’s been a wild several months in the world lately! For every awful literal and figurative explosion in the Middle East, we’ve gotten a heartwarming spectacle like Kamala Harris howling at Trump’s claims of Haitians eating pets. Oh, and RedLetterMedia deciding to investigate a haunted house in Iowa. That was a fun little surprise from them. On a smaller scale, though, I’ve been left curious by the trashing of the Joker sequel, encouraged by the surprisingly decent Sonic 3 trailer, and so jaded by what little info I care to hear about Sonic X Shadow Generations that I’d rather see Joker: Folie à Deux in theaters twenty times over than spend my money on it. Just to get meaning, artistry, or subtext out of anything, even if it’s botched in the execution. I’ll have to check it out this weekend to find out.

Of course, none of that crap has anything to do with today’s topic, so let’s just get my reasons for picking this subject matter out of the way. I’ve mentioned the severe lapses in my social life since high school on this blog before, namely a close friend I still pathetically happen to be grieving over. Well, after my neighbor’s parents forced her to ditch me for reasons they refuse to disclose—meanwhile, they allow her boyfriend in while simultaneously complaining that he doesn’t respect her boundaries, in which case she’s expressed her gratitude that I do—I gave an autism friendship and dating app a shot, yet my body adamantly refused to let me accept a match and start talking. That’s the extent of my post-Hannah trauma. So, motivated only the helpful words of Yoko Teshima from my comic series ElectroNuke, I accepted the match and immediately burst into tears. No, not the crocodile kind. My exchange with said match over the next several weeks was shockingly cordial and promising, and I thought the first two-hour phone call we had was equally so… but then, she told me we weren’t similar enough and said “hasta la vista”. Thus, another potential friend I don’t feel physically uncomfortable hanging out with was dead in the water. Not literally, mind you. I did not drown this person, although they were just seven miles away.

Sad to say, my frame of mind has not been great in the weeks since. I’ve been more depressed and taking more time away from my day program than usual, and one horrid day in particular last week was the result of seeing my neighbor with that… errr… very slick and charming fellow she finds so endearing. Meanwhile, she repeats the same phrase about missing me that isn’t reflected in anything she’s been doing for the past year-and-a-half. On that note, while I get to work on my comic scripts, the Recollected Cut, and my upcoming online class about getting published—while, you know, bombarded by unending reminders of other people’s success where I keep failing somehow, as well as all my peers never letting up about “anime, anime, anime”—I need something artsy and positive to lift myself out of this painful reverie, even if only temporarily. Besides, between rewatching a Max Payne 3 longplay, Ryan Hollinger’s dour horror film analyses, and Winnebago Man for the thousandth time each, I figure I’ve given into enough anger and misery porn for the time being… well, aside from blasting “Shout” by Tears for Fears and two covers of “Shock the Monkey”. Let’s sneak into a dying shopping mall, log onto AOL.com, and resonate with a couple of the most unexpected yet currently popular topics ever discussed here.

Exhibit A: All Those Soothing Nightmares

For the record, I will be getting into the essence of what these art styles are, but more important than the imagery typically associated with them are the examples I have to offer, in my opinion. Same goes for what any individual person has to offer. Anywho, we’ll start out with the first and most, uh… conflicting, let’s say. Emotionally, that is. See, the concept of “liminal spaces” isn’t so much an art style as it is a psychological phenomenon that inspired and defined a variety of art styles. The premise is that certain locations one associates with memories—whether fond or unpleasant—come off as vacant, hollow, fuzzy, and/or expansive, many of them seeming to stretch on without an end point. The more popular instances of these include shopping malls, hotels, open fields, playgrounds, beaches, and schools. The usage of the term “liminal” refers to how these locations often symbolize a period of transition in one’s life, such as the end of childhood and the start of adolescence. Moreover, they exemplify Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny, or the case of when something looks real but clearly isn’t, triggering a sense of dissonance in response to something that simply doesn’t feel right.

*cough* Anime. *cough* Phew! Excuse me!

The best way to describe the feeling you get from looking at and exploring these places is that they appear so familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time that your brain isn’t sure whether to feel scared or at peace. For this reason, reactions to liminal spaces differ radically between individuals, but although some spaces are clearly intended for horror, you won’t be hearing too many of them from me, as the sensations I derive from these environments are actually comforting and nostalgic more often than not. On my Sonic games post here and my weird childhood games post here, I explained that there’s a borderline surreal vibe to the old video games I grew up on, with which I formed generally positive associations despite being somewhat unnerved at times. Liminal spaces speak to me because describing these emotional connections is anything but easy, especially since my autism seems to have been the main contributor to that, so this is the best way I have of summing them up that other people are likely to get behind. It’s certainly helped with making sense of many dreams and imaginary scenarios I made up when I was little. Just take the night I dreamt up E-102 Gamma hunting several nonexistent E-Series models in Sonic Adventure DX—E-106 Eta in Emerald Coast, E-107 Theta in Speed Highway, E-108 Iota in Icecap, E-109 Kappa in Lost World, and E-110 Lambda on Angel Island at night, for some reason. A full cutscene even captured Gamma entering the Angel Island sector of the Mystic Ruins with Eta, Iota, and Kappa before facing Lambda. While, sure, the true clinchers behind this scenario’s eerie mystique were the fuzziness and imperfections, it would all later be replicated in a mod of mine called “The E-Series Survivors”, available for download here. Be careful, seeing as others have experienced an issue with loading it that I’ve been completely unable to replicate, so whatever’s going on there is beyond me.

Then again, more recently, I recalled and recreated something around ninety-nine times more niche and ninety-nine times more peculiar. One entry on my childhood games post that happens to hold up well enough today was Rugrats: Royal Ransom, and good lord, is it a liminal space and a half! Once the player pulls the throne out from under Angelica at the end (spoilers!), she’s whisked off the PlayPalace 3000 and into a convenient puddle of mud, prompting Kimi to tease her about washing up at the beach. No, this doesn’t add up given their house just a few yards away has a bath, a freshwater one no less. So, naturally, I was expecting the jovial end credits to conclude with Chucky being plopped down onto the beach, across which no sound rings out save for the seagulls and waves. Yes, it should be Angelica, but for some reason, I could’ve sworn it was Chucky who made the beach suggestion. Ultimately, the setting I thought up was Ogunquit Beach in York, Maine, a classic summer vacation institution for my immediate and non-immediate family. It’s important to note that the vision I had was photorealistic save for Chucky’s character model, and that the shoreline of Ogunquit Beach is so long that it’s near-impossible to tell where the sand ends and the tide begins. In the simplest of terms, this vision was a liminal space fiesta, with a kiss of some “haunted” Mario 64 hack like “B3313” thanks to the lack of any clear objective or layout. Thank god I was just able to faithfully reconstruct this vision at the start of this weekend, because frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to both cry and cringe so bad at once than I do when I look at it.

Instead of going on about the obvious qualities of default Gmod maps (I really only play Gmod to slash up hordes of anime characters to relieve stress), I’ll mention how mods for games that were already nostalgic have purposefully captured the same vibes. You have my own mod set for Sonic Adventure DX, for which I finally updated my “Beta Station Square” mod a few days ago to fix all the unnecessary issues with the Twinkle Park entrance. Between GrimPaper’s atmospheric (and at times ominous) beta lighting, the ethereal adventure field title card jingles, the new skybox for Station Square, the empty Station Square pool area, the Sonic X-Treme music during AutoDemo Windy Valley, and the AutoDemo Egg Carrier chao garden—oh, my dear, beloved AutoDemo Egg Carrier chao garden, the most liminal of liminal spaces to ever exist—all of the mods in this set are a must for those with a soft spot for liminal spaces. Of course, the crown jewel in my opinion is for a totally different game, that being a work-in-progress conversion mod called “Super Mario Sunshine 2001”, for which development screenshots and clips are frequently released by creator Portable Productions. When you watch the fifteen-minute demonstration, which flaunts the all-new story and soundtrack across the entirely original Dolpic Town Station as well as Spaceworld 2001 Dolpic Town and Bianco Hills, it carries this aura of one’s own surreal dreamscape being brought to life. The station theme is both soothing and foreboding enough to fit The Shining while the Dolpic Town theme comes off as borderline victorious, as if to tell those watching, “rejoice in your fantasies as life imitates art.” It embodies the magic of modding as much as it does the magic of liminal spaces, combining both concepts to give the middle finger to those superfluous mods designed to “fix” integral features and, instead, create a work of art that works to touch users in a way they never thought was possible.

Now, whereas classic examples of liminal spaces in other media for me include the setting of Teletubbies, the rolling green hills replicating the simplistic beauty of the default Windows XP background and… well, the music video for “No Rain” by Blind Melon, apparently… others might turn to something like Spirited Away as a textbook example. While I have no interest in discussing media like that any further, I can see a very strong liminal space quality in them for others to get mileage out of. Regardless, the overall concept often applies to horror given the eerie nature these spaces carry, particularly analog horror. Oftentimes in this context, elevator-style lounge music gets blended together with replications of kitschy, distorted VHS footage to generate nostalgia, hence the phenomenon’s direct link to surreal internet art styles like vaporwave and dreamcore. Well, the combination of that with unexpected tonal shifts and evidence of the VHS footage being tampered with has been the basis for such popular analog horror series as Gemini Home Entertainment, Local 58, and Liminal Land, all three of which I find exceedingly entertaining, well-made, and genuinely disturbing.

Still, a prominent type of location many fans of this phenomenon seek out for spooks is shopping malls, as, thanks to the glut of online shopping, even the nicest and busiest of malls appear to be dying off and getting left vacant, hence the term “dead malls”. Sadly enough, my old hometown in Pennsylvania was also home to the Exton Square Mall, a gorgeous two-floor mall as new and pristine as the rest of the town (the town in its current state was just two years old by the time my family moved there in 2000), and it has, indeed, achieved the status of a dead mall in recent years. However, I’ve managed to hang onto a rather, um… odd memory of that place, taking place in the center of a department store like Sears or JCPenney. While dark, fuzzy, and vague, it’s not by any means a bad memory, as the dim lighting is actually soothing to recall, the small electronics section was prominent due to my love of old games and computers, and a pair of escalators stretched and intersected two stories down in front of a blue neon sign, indicating that it was likely inside a Sears. While no photos seem to exist of this specific spot at this specific time, I have managed to edit together images of other mall department stores across America, which I darkened, added a blurry film grain to, and even cropped to lovely 4:3. In other words, I’ve found a way to mine beauty from dead malls as opposed to terror.

Funny enough, this acts as quite the segue into exhibit B, but before I move on, it’s interesting to mention that, with liminal spaces’ ties to vaporwave and dreamcore, the phenomenon is very much cross-media, meaning it applies to sound as much as images and video. Thanks to all of my unique auditory experiences over the years, I’ve taken the time to develop a custom liminal space album! You know, with my lack of a social life and everything. Titled “Sounds in Between”, its artwork combines imagery from my old hometown, a dim mall department store, “Mario Sunshine 2001”, and Sonic Adventure DX with beta mods over a green marble background you’d see in a decaying VHS informational tape. The track list starts off with three background themes from “Mario Sunshine 2001” before leading into a twenty-five-track beach-themed disc, a forty-five-track mall-themed disc, and a thirty-two-track suburb-themed disc, distorting various pre-existing songs and washing them out with brown noise and ambience related to their respective themes. The beach disc features “Tenderness” by General Public, SpongeBob production music, radio music from GTA: Vice City, and others; the mall disc features RedLetterMedia background numbers like “All But Me” by OTE, Wii system music, Saints Row 2 production music, and others; and the suburb disc features Pinback, Morrissey, the Animal Crossing: City Folk score, sporadic background tracks from Minecraft, and others. No, I cannot distribute it unless you want my ass sued off, but I can share with you the artwork.

Exhibit B: A Brighter Future and a Better Life

I feel that, when it comes to dead malls as liminal spaces, there’s a very stripped-down and non-technological quality to them. They feel blank and hollow due to being cleared of life and electricity, even if I tend to connect with them better if they feel very much alive and active—the empty ones are sought out primarily because they’re creepier. Of course, if liminal spaces are generally enjoyed due to feeling barren and hazy, another style gets its appeal from being… well, pretty much the exact polar opposite, that being lively and glossy. Enter “Frutiger Aero”, a newer fascination with an older innovation, that being Windows Aero. This aesthetic defined Windows operating systems during the 2000s, particularly Vista and 7, back before minimalism took over with Windows 8. See, the imagery associated with it mostly featured clean blue skies, clear water bursting with vibrant marine life, and open greenery capped off with modern cityscapes, but the resonance extends well beyond just pretty visuals. Together with shiny desktop and app icons like the early iTunes logo and the Windows Live Messenger logo, as well as more abstract desktop backgrounds with swooping light waves over shimmering panels, what this aesthetic evoked was the promise of an eco-friendly future that’s always felt far too distant in reality, one where technology and innovation worked in in synergy with nature as opposed to in spite of nature.

What makes liminal spaces so appealing to me is, as I summarized earlier, how they represent old familiar feelings that are far easier felt than said. In fact, it’s pretty fucking hard to put into words what these feelings are aside from soft and comforting. Either way, I know it when I see it, and that’s exactly my experience with Frutiger Aero—I simply didn’t get it until I started looking into it, and only then did I unlock the magic. See, back in Exton before I had my own computer, I would wait until I could use my dad’s in his office, which extended from the east side of my parents’ master bedroom. The OS started off as Vista before being updated to 7, and I would relish my limited time researching Sonic beta content through Internet Explorer, check my AOL inbox, organize my MP3 files on Windows Media Player, print out Sonic character renders, and accidentally infect his operating system with SpySheriff. Huh. Turns out I always had more panic attacks than friends. Regardless, the look of the OS always stuck with me, and that’s what makes it so endearing to explore in hindsight. Of course, my own past examples extend well beyond Windows.

The “Frutiger” in the name refers to Adrian Frutiger, a Swiss typeface designer, but you can treat the style of Frutiger Aero as being the opposite of classic Swiss architecture, even if it does share the same purity and idealism. The way I see it, just about anything clean, slick, and futuristic could be categorized as Frutiger Aero as long as it evokes something positive and nostalgic, even if that’s less than accurate to the actual parameters. For instance, I used to operate those bulky, rounded classic iMacs at my elementary school in Exton, often using them during breaks in my special ed classroom to… well, stamp infinite toilets onto a canvas in Tux Paint. What else would a kid my age do? Basically, I became so enamored with Mac OS X that I themed my Windows 7 laptop’s OS as such and used white printer paper to construct a makeshift Macbook exoskeleton, à la the Best of the Worst movie After Last Season. My only regret is that I made a Magic Mouse out of the cassette tape for my dad’s embarrassing grade-school single “Circus People”, and now, we can’t seem to find the damn thing. Blessed is the day we recover that treasure. Regardless, Apple devices surely felt very Frutiger-y until everyone started getting used to them, so one system that will forever hold the most resonance in this one art style for me is the Nintendo Wii. Funny enough, it might be more of a liminal space than any of the liminal spaces I’ve provided thus far, given it represented my transition from the GameCube to a new system, but the home screen, settings menu, Mii Channel, and Shop Channel were just as hypnotic as the system before, thanks to their simple background harmonies and white slate visuals. Even the Homebrew Channel, an unofficial hacking tool I only learned to install in recent years, has its own original disc menu jingle that evokes the same feeling of how sweet, fresh, and relaxing the future can be.

As far as the non-Windows timeline goes with this style, one of my favorite early examples would be, if any of you are old enough to recall, the bumper that would come before every trailer and preview on a Disney VHS or DVD. Rods and sheets of gold and salmon metal were layered over a blue backdrop of film reels as a metallic hum played and white text read “Coming Soon to Theaters” or “Coming Soon to Video and DVD”. In case these aren’t forever burnt into your retinas, you can find them everywhere on YouTube, and I even copied them for the artwork of my custom nostalgia-themed album titled “Memory Trigger”. Not long after those were phased out came the SEGA Dreamcast, on which the somewhat dinky digital sound design and airy startup jingle were combined with what can be best described as a cross between the Wii system aesthetic and the more abstract Windows Aero wallpapers. Among the smattering of popular Dreamcast games was Jet Set Radio, which predated me with the rest of the system but did feature stylish numbers like “Electric Tooth Brush” that acted as slick ’90s premonitions of the style to come.

The Nintendo DS would predate the Wii by a couple years, giving my sister Olivia a smooth several years of Nintendogs and me just one unbearable Chihuahua, and the vibes of Sonic Mega Collection and Sonic Gems Collection would capture the same breezy techno pleasantries of “Electric Tooth Brush” with an extra dose of serenity. In fact, Sonic Heroes would throw its own fun and unconventional hat in the ring in the form of ultra-futuristic stages with flying cars and running on clean and thermal energy, those being Grand Metropolis and Power Plant. Flash forward to the Wii, where titles like Wii Sports and Mario Kart Wii are synonymous enough that they don’t even beg to be introduced, but aspects of the style were present in MySims (check out my childhood games post for more on that harmless little dud) well before I found my true lost love in The Sims 3, in which the same traces can be found. Finally, one of the newest examples is Saints Row 2, some songs of which are included on my liminal space album, which features the clean and modern Downtown district, the green and wide-open Saint’s Row district, and elegant waterside shopping centers like if Rodeo Drive was in Venice. Hell, there’s even rolling affluent suburbs and a multi-floor underground shopping mall with classy lounge music playing, so extra points for throwing some Exton Magic™ into the mix. Yes, I did mean to trademark that term.

The Great Escape

God, what a tonal shift. I started out raving over my fruitless attempts to revive a social life that’s been lying six feet under since 2016, and here I am now, wholesomely waxing nostalgic about some upbeat 2000s computer theme. What this goes to show, however, isn’t just that we’re willing to latch onto whatever makes life more manageable and/or enjoyable, but that creativity is the ultimate escape for those struggling. Lately, I’ve homed in on ElectroNuke more than I have in a while, and I’m even giving up on my hiatus from ElectroVerse: Batman, a derivative venture I’ll be discussing properly soon along with ElectroNuke. These works in particular mean more to me than ever before, as ElectroNuke protagonist Elias Murphy (AKA The ElectroNuke, hence this blog’s name) is more or less a reflection of myself, so his imperfect yet endearing associates feel like friends to me as much as they do to him, yet our own personal experiences have left him and I wrought with imposter syndrome and survivor’s guilt. Moreover, many of these experiences surround an abusive boarding school and a high school friend being dragged away, and ElectroVerse: Batman #3 sees Hugo Strange essentially convert Arkham Hospital into a Social Darwinist torture school for the autistic in Canton, Massachusetts that’s disgustingly allowed to stay in operation. In other words, as a Massachusetts resident and the child of a family born and raised here…

Admittedly, many of these stories are also methods of voicing frustrations and injustices, even those more extreme than what I myself have had to endure—even the boarding school I attended wasn’t nearly as awful as the one in Canton. Then again, in the more recent revisions of ElectroNuke, I’ve focused on cinematic sequences and character moments that highlight the sleek cyberpunk futurism of Los Angeles and Frutiger Aero-inspired versions of real-life landmarks like Griffith Park. Aesthetics like that, liminal spaces, and the cryptic fall atmosphere of Pinback (see my Uncut Gems post on that band here) have flooded my work in recent years, and for good reason—I want to work with material I enjoy writing about, as nothing good ever comes from having no passion or interest in your work.

*cough* Shadow the Hedgehog. *cough*

Together, these elements will give ElectroVerse: Batman its gothic and low-key atmosphere and ElectroNuke the vision behind its world, that being like the real world but just a little bit better. Some social and political issues still exist, but fears regarding issues like war, mass extinction, and climate change are pretty much nonexistent. Granted, with the Pygmalion effect in mind, I’m always concerned that I’m not bound to succeed with the lack of faith rallied behind my projects, so what keeps me motivated is the prospect of them resonating with their readers, both their target demographics and the rest of their audiences—much like liminal spaces and Frutiger Aero seem to have done.

Hey, did you hear the first Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare are coming to PC? Hope they look nice enough to be worth the fifty bucks!

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