The Backrooms of Art History
From precursors to a Gen Z YouTube trend, Al Warburton pieces together a forgotten genealogy of digital art.
Backrooms (see also: poolrooms, dreamcore) are a cultural phenomenon embraced affectionately by Gen Z: photorealistically rendered first-person walkthroughs of eerie, mundane, or uncanny virtual spaces that privilege mystery and ambience over action. They’re comforting and unsettling in equal measure, and their aesthetics have leeched into Apple TV’s Severance and various indie horror films. Last year a post on YouTube’s official blog reported that backroom-related content was viewed two billion times in the first eight months of 2025. The origin of the phenomenon is thought to be a 4chan creepypasta from 2019 which blossomed into a collective worldbuilding project, a kind of Twin Peaks for the Roblox generation in which Youtuber Kane Pixels plays David Lynch. His debut feature Backrooms will be released this May by cult studio A24, and will likely confuse as many as it thrills.
As with any generation’s cultural craze, references can become circular and myopic, so it comes as no surprise that the backrooms go further back than Reddit or ChatGPT suggest. At least Wikipedia mentions Davey Wreden’s indie game The Stanley Parable (2011)—which fused first-person perspective, empty 3D-generated interiors, and the existential horror of the nine-to-five office job—in the article on “Liminal space (aesthetic).” But there’s an interesting blind spot in backroom lore that precedes Wreden and is arguably where the genre really begins: the digital dark ages of the late 1990s and early 2000s. If backroom lore is all about liminality, then the turn of the millennium is where things started to get lost in transition. This is when desktop graphics really landed, spurred on by the late-’90s arrival of the GPU and the release of technical protocols that allowed previously expensive CG software to run on cheaper hardware. The cost of experimentation went down, as did render times, which allowed curious artists to experiment with CG applications like Bryce, Form-Z, AutoCAD, SoftImage, Maya, and 3D Studio Max from the comfort of their studios, bedrooms, and basements.
Yet rendered CGI was still slow to compute and bound by a necessary simplicity. The most beguiling images were devoid of waxy CG humans or complex geometry and focused instead on crisp, lucid interiors whose clean lines and simple lighting accentuated the seductive visual qualities of synthetically illuminated space. Here’s where the backrooms aesthetic begins: with indie artists leaning into the affordances of their new medium and discovering that computer graphics perform a strange alchemy on sterile civic interiors like hospitals, reception rooms, tunnels, lounges, offices, and garages. At once skeletal and emotive, this kind of synthetic photography seems to mimic the architecture of memory itself.
This is where the DNA of the backroom as a foundational digital worldbuilding project begins. Evidence can be found most obviously in the work of Gero Gries, Klaus Schuster, Gerhard Mantz, and Ilkka Halso. Craig Kalpakjian’s Corridor (1995) is an early example of an animated “backroom” and one of very few examples of this genre held in an American museum collection. Ironically, most early examples of dreamcore have been confined to the backrooms of art history, buried in archives, rotten urls, and dead devices. There have been no survey exhibitions about early artistic CGI, and that’s probably because it never snowballed into anything resembling a movement. The concerns of this scattered cohort were too varied to cohere, although a cluster of German, Swiss, and Austrian artists benefitted from the scaffolding of Ars Electronica and a network of small media-focused galleries, including Wolf Lieser’s Digital Art Museum. More often than not their work was folded into group shows as a complement to the analog hyperrealism popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Here you might think of the immersive installations of Mike Nelson and Gregor Schneider; the sculptures of Ron Mueck, Duane Hanson, and Patricia Picannini; the Vancouver School of composite photography associated with Stan Douglas, Jeff Wall, and Rodney Graham; and the over-designed visuals of filmmakers like Wes Anderson and his dark Swedish counterpart Roy Andersson. All were part of a broader cultural “uprezzing” that worked across visual media of the millennium, and with the clarity of hindsight we can see was almost exclusively the preserve of straight white men.
Perhaps the most obvious analog touchstone for early CG backrooms is the constructed photography of Thomas Demand or James Casebere, which summons the same feelings and aesthetics as its synthetic counterpart. Yet the lack of obvious aesthetic differentiation between virtual modelling and miniature photography obscures important material and historical differences. Specifically, the work of Kalpakjian et al. symbolizes the “porting” of independent artistic practices (across film, sculpture, painting, photography, and animation) to the proxy worlds of CGI. This transition to the virtual was as pragmatic then as it is now, counteracting the frustration that so many artists encounter when trying to materialize their practice. As many graduates know, when studio space, materials, funds, patrons, gallerists, and fabricators are hard to come by, digital dematerialization feels a lot like creative liberation. You don’t have to rent space to store maquettes or miniatures, ship an installation to another continent, or hire a hundred actors for a photoshoot. Everything is on your desktop. And despite what old-school sensualists will say about the primacy of material engagement, that kind of practice has a high entry cost that most simply can’t afford. In that sense, dematerialization was also democratization.
Here is where I think a broader point can be made about how to historicize the evolution of computer art around the millennium. It’s fundamentally about desktops, decentralization, and dematerialization, and this provides a natural counterpoint to existing institutional efforts to survey “art in the age of the mainframe” that mostly end in the 1980s. I’m thinking here of landmark museum shows like “Electric Dreams” at Tate Modern in 2024 and “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2023, both of which focused on computational hubs such as IBM, Xerox PARC, and MIT, and the generative art practices of artists like John Whitney, Vera Molnár, Lillian Schwartz, and Ken Knowlton that these hubs fostered. This narrative flows in a more-or-less straight line to the present-day work of Casey Reas and Refik Anadol. It is an easy arc to trace because it centers on tentpole sites, a small cohort of artists, and a defined aesthetic register.
But without a plotter arm to guide us, how do we unpack and rationalize digital art as it develops from the 1990s onward? Mark Fisher would consider this the beginning of an interminable interregnum where culture is remixed ad nauseum and grand narratives evaporate, leaving us with dissociation, dislocation, and an explosion of throughlines—net art, machinima, Flash animation, post-internet art, indie games—that all deserve their own art historical stub. But, sometimes, from the stub comes a phenomenon sticky enough to bring renewed clarity to that tangled history. Backrooms point back to the moment when a certain kind of digital creativity began: with lone artists crafting hallucinatory portals into proxy worlds. This is the ground zero of digital worldbuilding.
Footnote:
This post revisits some of the aesthetics and artists I began investigating in the late 2000s, when I ran the digital art blog CGWTF. Aside from experimental CGI being largely a German-language concern, one of the obstacles to finding other artists working with computer graphics was that googling “CGI” resulted in tens of thousands of results for cgi-bin directories (CGI being an acronym for Common Gateway Interface, a backend component of web servers), an unfortunate glitch that impeded practitioners’ attempts to connect. Combing through these results to find artistic allies was a labor of love for those of us seeking community, and US-based artist Sara Ludy was the only person who answered a 2008 post I made on Rhizome’s website. Almost two decades later we caught up to discuss this column, and was reminded once again of Ludy’s work Dream House, which has something distinctly backroomsy about it.
Al Warburton is an applied media theorist working directly with CGI, AI, XR, VR, and ML between art, industry, and academia.
really thought provoking, loved this.