On Boundary's Edge — Art That Started With a Snapchat and Ended With Fear
It started with a snapchat from a friend aimed at the floor.
That's genuinely it. The angle, the soft pink glow, the way light scattered across the ground — it was strangely beautiful. I screenshot it immediately and thought, I need to do something with this. I didn't know what yet, but I knew it had something.
I began building the piece around that energy — the warmth, the glow, the sense of hovering. And somewhere in the process of working on it, the theme revealed itself. That tends to happen. You think you're making something about light and color, and then you realize you're actually making something about fear.
The floating feet. The invisible barrier. The void underneath.
This piece is about paratermiphobia — the fear of going out of bounds. If you've never heard of that word, you're probably not alone, but if you know the feeling, you know it immediately. That nauseating cognitive dissonance when the world just... disappears, and you're still walking on nothing.
Mine started with Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly on PS2. That game was notoriously glitchy — the geometry would drop out constantly, and suddenly you'd be suspended in a colorful void, your character's feet still animating on a floor that didn't exist anymore. I was young, and that feeling lodged itself somewhere deep. To this day I can't shake it in video games. That floating, that wrongness, that sense of having crossed into somewhere you were never supposed to be.
When I looked it up, I found out I'm not the only one. People have written about this experience online and gave it a name - Paratermiphobia. It has some overlap with more widely accepted phobias like Thalassophobia: fear of vast deep bodies of water (raise your hand if you've ever played Subnautica) and Kenophobia: fear of empty spaces and desolate landscapes.
On Boundary's Edge is that moment: standing at the threshold, toes at the edge, the world behind you and the void below. The golden shards, the glowing light, the swirling energy around the feet — it's beautiful, but it's also deeply unsettling if you let it be. That was always the goal. Art that looks like peace but feels like the edge of something.