Liminality is that space between, between time and between physicality; existence may not seem real or solid. Liminal experience may be through the standard five senses, but the other senses, those that we deny and do not understood are often enhanced. It is a different plane of awareness and experience.

Liminal 1 ~ Angourie, 1979

 
Liminal 2 ~ Lowhead, 1981 
One of the simplest ways to conceptualize the becomingness of liminal space in media is to think of the virtual.  In his essay “The Reality of the Virtual,” Slavoj Žižek addresses Gilles Deleuze's notion of the virtual as “pure becoming without being,”  which is “‘always forthcoming an already past,’” but is never present  or corporeal.7 The virtual is a liminal space that consists only of its  becomingness-state, and not an actual being or object to become.  It  exists as pure becoming that suspends both “sequentiality and  directionality”; it is a passage, but there is no line of passage.8   
 
 Even though both Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner locate liminality within an event (ritual for both of them, and initiation more specifically for Turner), the event  is clearly not the only place in media where one can find an  understanding of the liminal.  Alan Liu, just like Žižek before him,  plays on the idea that the liminal can exist as this larger,  directionless (or at least, reciprocating) space.  He identifies an  “encounter” of new media between literary and digital traditions, which  he notes is a “thick, unpredictable zone of contact—more borderland  (9) than border line.”10  This encounter zone, he explains, adapting  Jean-François Lyotard’s concept, produces and accommodates new media  that are inherently pagan; that is, they are “other” and “outside,” but  also inextricably intertwined with that which they are separated from.   Liu elaborates with an explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the  essence of new media by stating that “even as [McLuhan] projects the  otherness of new media onto the cultural other, he introjects that  otherness into the cultural self.”11   
 
 Folklore and popular culture have allowed many different manifestations  of liminal beings to emergence as representations of ambiguous identity.  Turner notes that “liminality is the realm of primitive hypothesis,  where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of  existence.” 12  He describes the nature of the subject as somewhat  incorporeal, dissolved, or even “invisible” during the liminal period.13   The subject, while neither located in the departed stage nor in the  arrived-at is still reliant on the presence of both stages.  This  “transitional-being,” or “liminal persona,” is characterized by a series  of contradictions.14  As having departed but not yet arrived, he is “at  once no longer classified and not yet classified…neither one thing nor  another; or may be both; or neither here nor there; or may even be  nowhere.”15  This subject, during the liminal stage, is “‘betwixt and  between’” all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural  classification.”16  
 
 Whether or not they are identified as such, the notion of liminal beings  has been explored by scholars throughout the field of media theory.   McLuhan mentions objects of technology, such as the camera or the  handgun, as being extensions of the human body.  The result of this  technological prosthesis  is a metaphorical amputation of some aspect of “humanness” from the  person, who, having been stripped of what makes him whole as a human  being, has now slipped into the liminal state. 
 
 Donna Haraway, in her famous essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” discusses the liminality of the cyborg  in terms of boundaries and contradictions.  She articulates the  complexity of the cyborg as being an “image of both imagination and  material reality,” a “hybrid of machine and organism”; it exists as  both-but-neither of these states.17  Like Turner, Haraway references  invisibility as a key classification of the liminal being insofar as it  cannot be recognized as any singular, corporeal, or embodied entity.   Cyborgs, she notes, “are about consciousness.”18  In a semiotic sense, “they are floating signifiers” that cannot construct a sign as they are not accompanied by necessary signifieds.19 
 
 Although the official terminology for the liminal addresses points in  time and places of action, one can see that by situating it within the  complex context of media—areas and practices of mediation, as well as mediated subjects and objects—the concept of liminal shapes a variety of ambiguous forms  (and anti-forms).  Keeping in mind more comprehensive set phrases, such  as “betwixt and between,” “transitionality,” “becomingness,” and  “borderland,” allows a flexible entryway into a sense of pure essence in  the liminal—to, literally, its liminality.