i woke up this morning and felt like i got it - this is a liminal space. it was a state in between slumber and wakefulness. and i knew that once i picked up my phone, that liminal space would be gone. i tried to just “be” in that space, but my sonos alarm wasn’t connected to wifi and instead of chirping quiet morningsong birds, it was the default buzzy annoying alarm that i had to physically walk over to and push a physical button to turn off.

but i remember the liminal space…

one thing i realized in (my definition of) liminal space was that there was minimal content. and that made sense to me because when you are transitioning from one state (or place) to another, there is meaning and content in the before and after. the in-between state may not be as crisp or defined as the “from” space or the “to” space. so “content” seemed to play a role in the definition of liminal.

i felt like i needed to spend more time in the liminal space. possibly because like many people i feel like we are in content overload. whether your content is from tiktok or podcasts or books or linkedin. we seem to have this insatiable hunger for content. i believe we do get a bit of dopamine rush when you come across interesting and meaningful content. but i wonder about how our brains are affected by this hunt for content. many people’s days are book-ended by checking content on their phone in the morning and scrolling feeds right before falling asleep. i think for me, even knowing what time it is ‘zaps’ me out of my liminal space. time is a form of organization which implies actions and content.

and back to the theme of this blog, generative ai. i think that being able to generate content quickly and easily is great. it puts food on my table. i think we will start to see more masters of these tool emerge to produce expressive high quality pieces. i think we will see new fresh voices who didn’t have the means and resources before; they will now be able to tell their stories with powerful tools to help them overcome the barriers to content production.

i used gen ai (firefly 4 ultra) to create these images of liminal spaces. it’s funny this interaction between human and machine. maybe ai can help us also get into these liminal states and spaces, and give us a bit of a break from all the content it is helping to generate.