Lost items and exposed shame – dreamcore’s inheritance and transcendence of liminal space and defamiliarization

ABSTRACT Dreamcore originates from a video (or image) form submitted on 21 April 2018, when an anonymous user posted a thread on 4chan’s paranormal section collecting images that would make people feel ‘uncomfortable', and another user’s comment under it gained the attention of the community. And it has been a new subculture that uses familiar scenes to make the audience nostalgic but uneasy, with two important characteristics: ‘Lost items’ and ‘exposed shame’. In contrast to the philosophical concept ‘sense of material’, the absolutely independent defamiliarization, or liminal space’s ‘neither … nor … ’, ‘lost items’ pursues the familiarity in strangeness without resorting to the expression of magical reality, or using ambiguity between the two to create a ‘either … or …’ atmosphere; Compared with modern urban planning based on the principle of ‘ecology’, ‘exposed shame’ reveals infrastructures that do not match the natural setting in the image, causing abruptness and embarrassment. Both point to the dreamcore’s playful ambiguity, thus not being governed by serious art and symbolising the original intention of free creation.