“Weird Studies” is a scholarly field that doesn’t and can’t exist. The Weird is that which resists any settled explanation or frame of reference. It is the bulging file labelled “other/misc.” in our mental filing cabinet, full of supernatural entities, magical synchronicities, and occult rites. But it also appears when a work of art breaks in on our habits of perception and ordinary things become uncanny.

• Can there be a weird studies? If so, why? If not, why not?

In my opinion, there can be a weird studies. I think most of the research into weird comes from people’s search for the unknown. Weird studies is more about people exploring the spiritual world. People study ghosts, magic and the occult, essentially because there are still many phenomena in the world that cannot be explained by modern science. So the unique weird studies have been created to explain these phenomena.

With the development of weird studies, people believe that ghosts do exist in the world. People will exist as ghosts after death. People who have lost families dream of their deceased family members giving them dreams, and that people who have died unjustly seek revenge in the form of ghosts. People believe in magic and create art on the subject. Although Hogwarts – the wizarding school in the Harry Potter series – doesn’t exist, there are still children waving their wands and muttering the spells from the books. People also believe that magical creatures exist in the world. Unicorns roam the depths of dense forests. Mermaids sing beautiful songs at the bottom of the sea. Werewolves howl at the full moon and vampires live in ancient castles. People believe that their destiny is ordained by the heavens, and in China they go to masters who have practiced Taoism to read their faces and palms in order to get a glimpse of their destiny. In the East, people still talk about feng shui and believe that feng shui affects the family’s fortune when buying a house. All of these are extensions of weird studies.

In addition, in the development of weird studies, there are also literatures such as Cthulhu mythology. Against the backdrop of rapid industrial development, the world of Cthulhu mythology was born. The gods were not as gentle and beautiful as they were portrayed in religion. The search for the unknown may not only lead to development and progress, but also to destruction and madness. Humans were no longer the object of praise, but rather the tiny, indifferent creatures of a higher civilization, not even entitled to a glimpse of the truth they had spent their lives seeking. Many people are still fascinated by Lovecraft’s world. This vast, mysterious and wildly bizarre universe continues to attract exploration and development to this day. Elements of Cthulhu are still widely used in novels, films and games today.

• How exactly might a work ots of percef art break in on our habiption? Do ordinary things become uncanny?

Artworks that want to break people’s habitual perceptions can add new things to familiar traditional perceptions, offering a fresh perspective on what people already know. For example, my project for this weird-o-verses assignment is the liminal space, which is an online art creation based on some familiar everyday scenes.

Long before the emergence of liminal spaces in the network sense, this related moniker existed in architecture and referred to the non-staying place between two destinations of human activity. Examples include the corridor between two rooms and the airport between two destinations. As liminal spaces have been developed and recreated on the web, the element of time has slowly been added to them. A certain scene in the interval between two points in time can now be counted as a liminal space, such as a midnight classroom between two classrooms whose time is during the day.

The meaning of liminal space in the online sense has now developed into a transitional space between two locations, a state of uncertainty without a past or a future. The images of liminal spaces often reflect a sense of nothingness, as if they were scenes from everywhere in life, but because of their ‘transitional’ nature, there is no cause or effect, only an empty scene with no one in it, like an empty stairwell at night, or a hospital corridor, as if one were in this familiar yet unfamiliar space, with no place to come from and no place to go, only an invisible oppression.

As this internet art gradually developed and grew in influence, many art practices began to invoke the concept of liminal space for their creations, developing art forms such as weirdcore, dreamcore and poolcore.

Weirdcore is created or edited with amateur or low quality shots or digital images that give the impression of conveying confusion, disorientation, alienation, nostalgia or incompetence. Visually it can convey a strong sense of the general look of the photo format and the feeling it brings existed on the old time internet, around the late 90’s to the mid 2000’s. Amateur editing, raw digital graphics, low-fidelity photography and image compression are the most common elements in weirdcore images. In contrast to liminal space, weirdcore has been given an extra element of surrealism. Most of the weirdcore contents are post-processed with artificial compositions, either by deliberately blurring clear images or by toning down the brightness to create a sense of unreality. Because much of the weirdcore culture is in the style of the internet from the 1990s to the early 2000s, for the generation Z there is always a sense of nostalgia interspersed with this artistic creation. They have vague but unforgettable memories of ancient computer information technology, and weirdcore is seemingly a highly saturated promotional image that the generation Z saw in their ignorant childhood, evoking their childhood memories.

Based on this sense of nostalgia, weirdcore has evolved into a special style called dreamcore. In contrast to weirdcore, dreamcore removes the horror element and intensifies the surreal and dreamy feeling, making the pictures more like scenes that only appear in dreams, as if everyone has dreamed of them but can’t remember how.

The fascination of people, especially the generation Z crowd, with liminal spaces comes from the nostalgia of being in this unoccupied blurred space. They are linked to the childhood memories of the generation Z crowd, the spaces in our memories are similar to liminal spaces, they are the spaces that have been lost and we can never go back or repeat. In these spaces, there is no concept of time, nothing changes, and this constancy brings a sense of reassurance. The absence of the subject in the liminal space allows people to return to a state of oneness, as if they were infants without the ability to distinguish between subject and object. The liminal space allows the viewers to unburden themselves of the subject, to hide in this space for a while and to find a respite from the ever-evolving society and the never-ending time.

Learning Sprint 1 | Weird: Reflective Analysis / Yushan Zhao / Themes in Contemporary Art (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0