FRASCARI SYMPOSIUM VI (2023) 3 Times: Finishing as Ending LIMINAL TEMPORALITY AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF ‘THE BACKROOMS’ Andrew Gipe-Lazarou, Ph.D. lazarou@vt.edu At 9:37am EST on Sunday, May 12 th , 2019, on the anonymous imageboard site 4chan, 1 a thread entitled ‘unsettling images’ was initiated with the following image [1] and a prompt reading “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’” (No.22661164). 2 Seven-and-a-half hours later, at 16:55 and 17:07, following the posted inquiry ‘what is that?’ (No.22662579) about the original photo, two subsequent posts responded with the following texts: “looks like an office building gutted of all furniture and cubicles” (No.22662655); and “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.” (No.22662718). [1] 1 4chan is an anonymous ‘image-based’ bulletin board dedicated to a variety of topics ‘from Japanese animation and culture to videogames, music and photography’ (which catalogues each post with an 8-digit code). It is the unofficial English-language counterpart to the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel (also known as 2chan), and as of 2022, it received more than 22 million visitors monthly, approximately half of whom were from the United States. See https://www.4chan.org/index.php (Accessed 4 February 2023). 2 The original ‘unsettling images’ thread has been archived on 4chan’s ‘Paranormal’ board: https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/22661164/#22661164 (Accessed 4 February 2023).