This is the first blog post in which I am documenting the journey of writing an academic essay. The word cap (1,500 words, I’m also presuming a ±20% discrepancy that goes along with that) feels short. I’ve previously (in college) written a 2,000 word essay which was too short to fully explore my ideas, and I ended up with plenty of loose ends and a hollow, unsatisfying final paragraph in which I scrambled to do all of the tying-together that was missing in the main body.

The problem was a thematically vast, half baked idea that really had no true conclusion, and I eventually drowned in the tangles of mental spaghetti that I was summoning up from the depths of my own brain. I’d advise all readers of this blog post to avoid embarking on such fruitless endeavours – they all end in catastrophic disaster and are probably best conducted by crash test dummies whose expertise in moments of crashing and burning are unparalleled the world over, or so I’ve heard.

This essay I wanted to do something different.

So I have spent a large proportion of my allotted working time for this assignment doing nothing.

Fear not, this is a productive form of nothing. I did nothing (and continue, in earnest, to do so) in order for my mind to breathe, and for the yarn of ideas to become unspooled across the floor in front of me; ripe for the picking. I want my avenues of exploration to be a bit more tangible this time round, and I figured that with the word count I can focus on three discrete threads within my overarching topic. And so: onto the topic.

I have recently developed an interest in the word ‘Liminal’. It refers to the in-between, a boundary zone, a no-zone. Somewhere that is neither here nor there, transition and change, after the rejection of old values but before the adoption of a brand new set of values. This all began with an internet phenomenal that I’ve observed, in which users are sharing images of ‘Liminal Spaces’ to forums. A liminal space is defined as somewhere (often indoors) that is normally bustling or busy, but is in a state of unusual calmness. The spaces themselves are often liminal in nature – waiting rooms, car parks, malls, corridors or stairwells are all common subject areas. People never feature in these photos and flora is also often excluded, it’s the lack of (human) context that gives the certain uncanny, eerie feeling evoked by these images.

I’d like to explore liminality within my essay, and also within my upcoming sound piece assignment. I want both assignments to feed into one-another, and to inform the process of each other. Perhaps I’ll talk about how we deal with spaces whose purpose is no longer required, perhaps about the psychology of the uncanny, perhaps about how we make spaces primarily for people, but they are all destined to be empty someday. I’m pulling on lots of threats, but I have yet to find a concrete question to ask.