I share this as the Intelligence Love Revolution residency approaches a phase in which each of us artists will share, in the form(s) of our choosing, where we are with our respective projects. This text is part of my project, which unfolded in several ways, helping me connect to lesser-developed ideas and support new one’s surface: this short text, a film, a sound work to be used, an audiovisual moving image sketch, and a paper. A longer form piece of writing will later accompany this text. I have another space that looks at the history and the search for the image associated with the backrooms, which is here.
The Backrooms
Sunday, 19 May 2019, and the time is 14:37:00. It is Around one hundred years since Sigmund Freud wrote Das Unheimliche, also known in English as The Uncanny. Any second, a post will be uploaded to the image-sharing board 4chan(4chan, 2024), with this invitation to “post disquieting images that just feel 'off'” that will expand The Backrooms(Phenomenon List, 2024) and become a conduit of the uncanny for millions.
Shared to 4chan’s Paranormal-themed board, the post begins the thread ‘x’, (/x/ - Paranormal » Thread # 22661164 » unsettling images, 2024), expanding the backrooms from creepypasta (shorthand for anything horror-related posted to the internet) and digital folklore into a phenomenon through outpourings of experiences with the liminal—a sensory threshold, hence barely perceptible—in stories, games, fanbase, films, and TV shows presenting many a way, I see as a way to listen to (their) uncanny being.
This text will consider, through the lens of notions of the uncanny, why this relatively simple image activated so much for many people.
I offer a way to think about the unconsciousspatially and sonically through the power of a single image—a simple photograph that has inspired millions to respond to it and create stories, books, gifs, films, games, TV shows, and more.
Speculation about the image from the outset created its legends. Then, conveniently for me, earlier this year, a viral Twitter post declared, “The backrooms have been found.” The discovery was made by a dedicated Backrooms discord community and the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), which traced the image to an archived web page in 2003. Spoiler alert: The photo was taken during the preparations to renovate a furniture showroom in Wisconsin. The overwhelming mundanity of this discovery, despite stripping its aura, did nothing to lessen its significance as an example of liminal aesthetics.
I arrived at a meaningful relationship with The Backrooms this year. That’s not to say it hadn’t registered vaguely somewhere with me, but horror is not something I follow and often avoid. It is October, and I have been working on this project for many months. I am confused about the timeline of the project and the initial drive for it. Like anything of being, a level of understanding is arrived at in a thinking backwards, a retroactive encounter, the meaning coming from the thinking and the doing.
This year, I began watching the Apple TV show Severance. (‘Severance (TV series)’, 2024). Abandoned halfway through the first episode, it lingered in my thoughts. This start-stop venture required me to push past the irritation I felt at it—the right time to watch it arrived several weeks later. I got into it as I let it off the hook of high expectations. Its characters navigated identical, seemingly unending corridors, revealing the show's creators' interest in the liminal they tinted with an uncanny aesthetic. Its creator, Dan Erickson, cites The Backrooms as a significant influence.
Spoiler alert: Severance is science fiction with a psychological thriller twist. It follows a selection of employees of the fictional corporation Lumon Industries who have agreed to join their “severance” program, which will separate their non-work memories from their work ones. There is much ambinguity about the work undertaken in the role of refiners. Numbers are sorted on screens the meaning of which, is explained, will become clear when you see it. One, such employee Helly R, a refiner, in episode one, records this message in a video for her future self, "I have of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure, colloquially known as severance. I acknowledge that, henceforth, my access to my memories will be spatially dictated. I will be unable to access outside recollections whilst on Lumon’s severed basement floor, nor retain work memories upon my ascent. I am aware that this alteration is comprehensive and irreversible. I make these statements freely." Something fascinating and appealing lies in the ability to serve aspects of your being in this way; as you think about this idea, like many of us, it feels obvious that this concept is doomed to fail; the bleeding from one sort of memory will go into another. How would you know where either memory sits when delineating between work and non-work memories? We are invited to watch with a sense that we understand that the premise is that this idea of severance is impossible; it is as if we are in on it as the character is clueless. Yet, it is instilled in us to believe our memories as if there is something solid about them. But what if it is possible? Severance, not by an implant, but by design.
Perhaps the assumption that the concept will fail shows an inert failure of our understanding of memory, which isn’t so easily understood. Two states of our being are severed to some degree, what we have come to call awake and asleep. The memories from our dreams are treated entirely differently than those we think of from being awake. Why do we do that? The body we sleep with is the same one we wake with; how is it possible not to believe in what we dream? The asleep and the awake share consciousness; the baby us, the child, the person you are today and the one a week ago also share that consciousness. The body in severance passes a threshold in the form of the workplace location; at that point, the ability to bring you from one to the other isn’t possible. You then spend a day doing the work thing, and at the prescribed time, you leave and resume the non-work thing. Curiously, the definition of everything done outside of the work is simply non-work. I have been trying to form an equation of the separation of work and non-work; one human is divided in two, and that half is divided into two: conscious and non-conscious actions. (a-sleep a-wake). One human/awake/asleep/ /////// sharing [a] conscious-ness]. Very strange manoeuvring we are, indeed.
Unlike the image, The Backrooms are not so easily found, perhaps impossible. Memory, sound and listening, the uncanny and the unconscious are significant drivers in my practice. I have been struggling with the notion of the unconscious, forces of which the conscious futility battles; my proposition is simple: What if The Backrooms are a way to pivot the unconscious?
This simple image spawned a multiverse of uncanny liminal manifestations in outpourings of responses, all of which, either directly or as an influence, used sound as a catalyst to describe its effect on them. Now, I use this as part of my thinking about where we might be in connection with or in the unconscious. This image stands in place of the human, a being with or in a body navigating life.
These words, “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”, are a signifying chain, an invitation to respond and share. Already sound is activated, and with sound comes hearing and with effort listening. What is it that disquiets and creates an off feeling? The use of disquieting here is striking; there is an immediacy of bringing sonic material, which sounds to the surface to share images with a similar effect. What came to pass was the sharing of other images; many things with holes (trypophobia) in them appear in the early shares on the thread; it is the life beyond the thread where the stories began, words upon words trying to reach others.
The liminal aesthetic heavily uses the range of the eerie and arrives at the uncanny valley. In liminal aesthetics, it is the place that lacks an unexpected context or order; in Freud's uncanny, the lack is present with us, a dread placed upon something other than where it originated. The word uncanny is quite lacking; a translation from German to English is itself uncanny, and the translation isn’t straightforward, unheimlich—not from home, “…something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.” (Freud, McLintock and Haughton, 2003, p.148)
What is in the liminal that makes it eerie to people? Is this the space of the unconscious and one that, with all our might, we push back? Space that psychoanalysis might see this as survival, the mind or the brain attempting to keep life, perhaps the world, at bay. Otherwise, it would be too overwhelming.
Back to the invitation to “post disquieting images that just feel off”, the shortness of this un-punctuated sentence leaves gaps on either side, left and right. There is already space for so much interpretation, the inevitability of similarity, and even mundane surfaces.
A little after the initial 4chan, another one was shared with this text; “If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you— Anonymous, 4chan.(/x/ - Paranormal » Thread 22661164 # 22662718» unsettling images, accessed 13/08/2024). This post introduces the noclip concept and reveals how vital language has been to creations inspired by The Backrooms.
Noclip, concerning The Backrooms, refers to the extra dimensions that noclipping accesses. It is said that noclip means leaving reality, glitching, and entering the backrooms. Reality, here, is the still image depicting a place, however ambiguous its specificity. Noclip can also, in video games, give a character the ability to pass through solid environments such as walls. It is not hard to understand the attraction of this to those who play games and those who don’t. Noclipped can be considered an adventure with the liminal through a lens considering the unconscious as a space.
As a gamer, I enjoy pushing the frame, trying to go beyond the parameters of a given scene. Gaming to the point where the illusion of space collapses. The visceral sensation of controlling a character, trying to get them into a space beyond the pixel, pushing the limit to move them through walls, hanging, or walking in the air. All the while, I understand this is accessed in a space between the screen and the controller in my hand.
A being brought to an edge, where polygons collapsed or deconstructed and blended with a seeming nothingness often represented by darkness. I remember how I felt the physical tension of resistance of the space to let the character go on. Yet the illusion of space often momentarily broke the tension and a moment of possibility that you might see what else there might be. Logically, I understood there was no-thing there; the render ended, yet there would be these moments where the edge blurred and the sense of a possible off-screen space opened up.
As far as I can see, the passing of one hundred years between the 4Chan post in 2019 and the publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny in 1919 is a coincidence. From the beginning, The Uncanny has been uncanny; that is, the word itself is not an exacting translation into English from Freud’s original German, das Heimlich. The transitions of translation add a granular shift to respond to the cliche or stereotype. The un-homely comes from its reflection; it is the opposite of homely; they are the same but different. In the encounter with the uncanny, you are with both; it is like a Mobius strip, the two sharing a single edge entwined to the other in a twisted loop. You cannot understand the un without its opposite. Uncanny/canny doesn’t quite work where like homely/un-homely.
The uncanny is a reflection displaced, a view believed to be the gaze's angle. We are scaring ourselves out of being. For Freud, the uncanny is a special kind of fear, attaching itself to something safe and rendering that something that scares us bearable.
The background to the making of my sketch, Displace[in] The Backrooms
I see an image—a photograph—a place? Tinged with a yellow hue, four un-homely fluorescent ceiling lights illuminate a selection of pale yellow geometric patterned wallpapers covering an assemblage of walls with gaps—not doors, making a room; maybe it is a corridor, not so familiar. It is not like any I have been in.
My reflexes have raised my feet off the ground at the thought of touching the dirty, mottled brown-yellow carpet underpinning the scene. As I sit, I feel like I am hovering, staring at the image on the screen. The glaring fizz of the lights is dizzying. "Are these walls moving?” Tricked eyes zoom in, out, and about, straining to focus and see what’s around the corners. Attempting to centre or fix my gaze feels impossible. The image moves despite my resistance to keep it still. Like fluorescent lighting in life, the screen flickers, slow and fast. The image beats as if trying to rhyme into a rhythm, slipping from predictable to chaotic. Discomfort rises as the scene shifts the coordinates, the view, and my perception.
Unlike the scene, this feeling is familiar; how easily I, a human, am confused when in front of the mirror, especially when there are many. Curiously, my ears and my eyes are confused by what is happening and what is not.
The image is still; it is just that, no sound, yet the sound moves freely, thoughts of what has rested upon the carpet, what has whizzed through the gaps, what lingered. Did anyone stay there?
This image is body-like, and its location ambiguity reaches far beyond what we can see. This is like being alive, so much of which happens beyond the body's frame/form. This space of that which is there but you are not sure where is repeated, the noclip. Temporal, shift.
Displace[in] The Backrooms
Watch here coming soon
The final work, a moving-image audio-visual sketch Displace[in] The Backrooms is a response to the invitation to “post disquieting images that just feel off,” I have created a sketch using a still image activated by sound, or lack of it, to change the configuration of the space in which it is to affect the way the viewer sees it. It is moments of unvanny feelings I have that I try to recreate in sound and the affect on my body and psyche which is represented by the backrooms image. The piece is contemplative and durational. The screen fills with the passing of activation on the image, which stands in place of my [the] human body in my work. It maps the dynamical relationship to bring a flow of the process of being alive, the flow of the present in conscious marked locations, all the while navigating a space between light and dark. The counting beginning at zero shows instances of the present, these will count to infinity, in theory, if left to run, representing the pthought about the dependent relationship between (a)image and (a)word(s) that activate each other. Maybe the counting ends in death, maybe not. I listened and thought about creating a sound and visual work dependent on each other, plus the added dimension of the out-of-frame space and sound traces being heard and listened. The space activates, and over time, the image becomes increasingly difficult to see, blinking as the light-er becomes visible and layers of memory tally up. This mapping of being are registered in numbers, and leaving traces as fog create a useless map. The image is constantly affected and displaced by the sonic material activating it, and the space is ac-cumulatively joined by a fog, not replaced by it; the image [the body] remains.
References
4chan (2024). Available at: https://www.4chan.org/ (Accessed: 1 November 2024).
Freud, S., McLintock, D. and Haughton, H. (2003) The uncanny. London: Penguin Books (Penguin classics).
Phenomenon List (2024) Backrooms Wiki. Available at: https://backrooms.fandom.com/wiki/Phenomenon_List (Accessed: 1 November 2024).
‘Severance (TV series)’ (2024) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Severance_(TV_series)&oldid=1248146879 (Accessed: 29 August 2024).
The Backrooms Wiki (2024) Backrooms Wiki. Available at: https://backrooms.fandom.com/wiki/Backrooms_Wiki:FAQ (Accessed: 1 November 2024).
/x/ - Paranormal » Thread #22661164 » unsettling images (2024). Available at: https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/22661164/#22661164 (Accessed: 8 August 2024).
/x/ - Paranormal » Thread #22661164 » unsettling images (no date). Available at: https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/22661164/#22662718 (Accessed: 1 November 2024).
Comments