Foreign Space

They say that a mirror reflects an alternate dimension, but is it far from the truth?

Do you sometimes look at a mirror and feel a rush of strange feelings? Does the reflection of your body look abnormal?

Before I begin my main point, there is a story I want to share; When my family traveled to our province for a vacation, I felt strange, weirded out, but after a short while I started to acclimate to a new environment; After a week had gone by, we returned, but I felt estranged in my own HOUSE; The space seemed odd; even our stairs felt steeper, Mind you, the house we stayed in the province had no stairs, so it was definitely weird to feel alien in a place where I was supposed to belong.

To begin my point, acknowledgment of the familiarity and the subtle weirdness blurs the line of the "gut feeling" of abnormality, like liminal spaces where it is traditionally depicted as familiar spaces yet you don't seem to remember where you can recall them, providing a raw feeling of "eeriness." They are usually thresholds such as stairs, hallways, corridors, or even an empty room, so what do they relate to mirrors?

Mirrors showcases the abnormality within us, externally or internally, it treads the human mind to prosecute itself worthy of selfworth or execute its own being to a higher unreachable standard just like liminal spaces, where familiarity is profound yet still feels strange and weird, exactly how we look ourselves in the mirror, yes It is native by nature however It sometimes feel unproportionate and look abominable.

From Scarbor Siu, it depicts an empty room with a balcony, an example of liminal space; the image appears to have a film setting; the more you look at it, the more unsettling it feels.

The extent of alienation from our environments or our being varies by space or time; you don't seem to have an idea why it is usual or abnormal. Take surrealism, where art illustrates the strangeness and familiarity to construct a complicated way to showcase the subconscious. It tests the boundaries of the usual and the foreign, like the psychological phenomenon "Uncanny Valley," where your mental thoughts are disturbed by deepfake images and videos, or alternatively physical objects like hyperrealistic robots, dolls, or mannequins, or anything that relates to a high degree of closeness to a human face.

Let us REFLECT on this, we perceive normal as being familiar given time, yet that perception becomes void when there are internal forces acting on It, let us go back to Uncanny Valley, Masahiro Mori a roboticist and the person who coined the term "Uncanny Valley" from his essay (translated by Karl F. MacDorman, and Norri Kageki which was approved by Mori himself) he said that industrial robots are less valued by humans because of their lacking characteristics, while Dolls, Stuffed animals and bunraku puppets are somewhat close to an expected appearance then they are given value and care, but too much of expected/exaggerated physical attributes seems to hit a "Valley" where it becomes distorted and eerie to look upon those objects.

The psychological phenomena, uncanny valley, or concepts heavily relied on "normal given eeriness," such as surrealism and the existential crisis of mirrors, are interesting at best; they dictate our inner core by guiding the conscious by the subconscious, a cognitive distortion that is given point by deep internal emotions, yet where it stems from is still undeterminable even when theories are presented; it is like aimlessness given aim.

Familiarity and abnormality are somewhat interconnected; you might solely get the other, but there is a point where strangeness or normality steps in to disturb your mind and question your very own psyche.

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,"  said Carl Jung.