In the movie Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979), three men enter the Zone—a seemingly ordinary overgrown meadow interspersed with derelict post-military remnants and disused objects. They wish to reach an abandoned building that contains a special room granting one’s deepest wishes. Yet, a strange and looming danger persists: crossing the meadow in a straight line might not be safe. Their guide warns, “The Zone is a very complex maze of traps.” The nature of these traps remains unknown; what matters is the radical complication of an otherwise simple landscape. Their movement must be carefully choreographed—the guide throws a white cloth tied to a metal nut ahead before taking the next steps, pausing to anticipate a possible response. The scene is uncanny, almost ritualistic, yet at its core, it is merely men crossing a meadow. This seemingly ordinary terrain becomes estranged, as perception shifts from habitual recognition to heightened awareness, pulling what would normally be a passive background into an active foreground. By losing resolution of certainty and meaning, the meadow entirely captivates our attention and forces it into a state of diffuse, high-alert focus.

A similar unpredictable strangeness and uncertainty are brought upon earthlings by climate change, starting to turn the landscape of the Anthropocene into a Zone. The background is shifting toward the center: from energy and food production to waste management, microplastics, rising CO₂ levels, and the uncanny biodiversity loss. These forces operate beyond the visible frame, largely imperceptible to the naked eye. Yet their presence looms—a creeping expectation of floods, heatwaves, and the uncanny disappearance of animal populations, widening the cracks in the mechanics of the background. The global landscape is getting weird and Zonified on its own, yet some mainstream landscape architects seem determined to impose familiar harmony onto increasingly troubled territories. It is precisely these pleasing images that push landscape back into habitual perception, causing it to fade into the background of experience. If the lawn is burnt by the sun, we irrigate it. Socially and environmentally relevant processes are normalized or harmonized into transparency.

Habitual perception of landscape occurs when familiar design elements and spatial arrangements are recognized without conscious engagement. It limits critical awareness and interpretive agency, preventing landscapes from being actively perceived as dynamic, relational, and politically constructed spaces. A park is there to walk a dog, have a picnic, exercise, or play ball with children—a familiar space structured by cultural norms that dictate how one should behave. It is utilitarian and aesthetically codified. In fact, it is so highly defined, high-resolution, and instantly recognizable that it demands no real engagement, no questioning. The more it solidifies into a category, a known identity, a sign—the more we automatically recognize it and the less we see it.

In defying habitual perception, a relevant theoretical reference is Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement (ostranenie), introduced in his 1917 essay Art as Device[1]. Shklovsky was intrigued by a passage from Tolstoy, in which Tolstoy describes dusting furniture at home yet being unable to recall whether he had already dusted a particular chair. The act had become so automatic that he couldn’t even remember his actions from minutes ago. Estrangement in art, according to Shklovsky, has the power to disrupt this automatism, shifting objects from passive recognition to aesthetic estrangement. It is framed and objectified in its own thingness, demanding attention—not merely to be recognized, but to be seen, or in Shklovsky’s terms, “to make a stone stony.”

This aligns closely with Martin Heidegger’s concepts of “ready-at-hand” (Zuhandenheit) and “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit), introduced in his seminal work Being and Time[2] (1927). Using his famous hammer analogy, Heidegger explains that during hammering, we do not consciously notice the hammer as long as it functions—it remains an extension of our body and objectives, seamlessly integrated into the task at hand. However, once the hammer breaks, it ruptures this perceptual transparency, making us suddenly aware of the hammer as an object, disconnected from its network of utility. It transitions from ready- to present-at-hand.

We could argue that Heidegger’s shift from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand evokes a similar kind of “radical thingness” as Shklovsky’s estrangement—both disrupt habitual engagement, forcing perception to slow down. In this sense, Shklovsky’s device could be seen as a cognitive precursor to Heidegger’s ontological rupture that produces a similar effect. Just as estrangement may emphasize the constructedness of an artistic object, Heidegger’s present-at-hand reveals the being of an object outside its functional context.

Further effects of estrangement, or perhaps the ‘ultimate mystification of the ordinary,’ can be explored through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), as proposed by its founder, philosopher Graham Harman. He stresses that objects are inherently inaccessible in themselves. No matter the method of investigation, an object remains more than the sum of its parts or sum of observations. Regardless of how present an object appears, it retains an essence that is fundamentally inaccessible and perpetually beyond human comprehension. Such a concept, inherently deaf to our conventional issues of perception or design, suggests that any design inspired by OOO would highlight how objects remain essentially locked out of our perception. In this way, OOO could be seen as treating all objects as inherently low-res, emphasizing their perpetual and unconditional estrangement from understanding. If Shklovsky argues that the “purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known”, OOO could illuminate the investigation of how things can be perceived as unknown.

Shklovsky’s estrangement was first published in 1917, the same year, inscribed on Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square was first painted in 1915. This period marked a dramatic reform of perception and expansion of the interpretative field of art. Both the recontextualization of the Fountain and abstraction in Black Square disoriented their audiences, triggering negotiation over what could be considered art. Some were appalled, and others searched for ways to reconcile a urinal or a black void with artistic intention. Both works destabilized recognition—not through aesthetic refinement but through a rupture in artistic expectation. They complicated meaning and introduced ambiguity as a condition of perception. What followed was a more confrontational engagement with the spectator, one that sought not to define but to subvert.

In The Emancipated Spectator[3] (2008), Jacques Rancière writes about art spectatorship and argues that the spectator is never passive but always engaged—actively comparing, interpreting, and constructing meaning. He proposes a starting point based on the equality of intelligences, where the spectator is already emancipated—not merely receiving fixed meaning from the artist, but negotiating and co-creating it through interpretation. He describes this space of negotiation and calls it the Third Thing.

We could say that the Third Thing is an abstract field of relationality where, in the case of art, the spectator will re-engage with the art she[4] has seen and compare it to the one she is observing within this abstract mesh. In a way, we could say that the artist submits art to this space, which is both universal and yet different for everyone. He undisputedly rejects the hierarchical transfer of meaning or knowledge from artist to spectator as an imposition of thought.

Rancière’s preceding idea of The Ignorant Schoolmaster[5] emphasizes how authority can reject the traditional hierarchical model of knowledge transmission from teacher to student, instead allowing the student to explore meaning on their own terms. He seems to be against fixation and determinism—favoring a form of low-res mediation based on the equality of intelligences, where knowledge or meaning is not dictated but encountered in an abstract space of negotiation.

When he writes about Shklovsky’s Device, Rancière says that estrangement ‘gives back innocence to the act of seeing’. This suggests that Rancière is only interested in estrangement as long as the meaning is subtracted from the thing. In other words, as long as it gets low-res and opens up ambiguity, which expands the potentiality for perception.

The Krater project in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is a site that emerged from the malfunctioning of several urban processes—management, real estate dynamics, property oversight, maintenance, and land-use policies. Everything went wrong, yet this error space triggered a lush third landscape[6]. It raises many provocative questions, i.e. is this already a park, and should communities be ‘growing’ parks instead of designing and constructing them? Krater could have remained an unintended byproduct of socio-political conditions had it not been inhabited by a group of architects and artists. Their intervention did not impose a redesign but rather engaged with what was there—experimenting, analyzing the ecological dynamics of the site, materials, and potentials, and organizing workshops and debates.

A powerful moment in Krater’s conditions is an existing neighbouring basement, offering a plug-and-play connection to the site’s future basement that has not yet been built, so the connection was closed. It is now a metal door in a wooden converter, in a concrete wall, separating in 50 cm, a thriving ecology from a liminal semi-dead commercial interior. Both worlds seem estranged and radically alienated from each other, by each other. Such portals and contradictions are precious as they puncture perception and can productively disorient our understanding of the world around us.

From an architectural perspective, the Krater ‘set-up’ resembles an unfolding of a research expedition or a DIY lab, a site of investigation and experiment rather than resolution. Krater is an emplacement of questions rather than answers. It seems to permit everything and dictate nothing. Through this project, Krater entered the field of collective perception, gaining visibility in newspapers, magazines, and awards—becoming an ambiguous object embedded in public discourse surrounding the production of space. Everything within it is unstable, in flux, and utterly low-res. What had happened, what is happening, and what is supposed to happen remains unclear.

The difference between high-res and low-res becomes tangible in the Warsaw Uprising Mound Park by Archigrest and topoScape, which demonstrates two modes of addressing the participant. The landscape features a complex stratum of memory that wishes to be brought forward to perception. The first approach is through high-res information boards, transmitting precise knowledge of what had happened on the site. The other is an ambiguous experience where the abstraction of the uncovered debris is estranged and re-contextualised in the form of ‘objets trouvés’ along the paths and through a unique production of concrete that incorporates the historical remains and debris in its structure.

A similar manifestation of ambiguity in material conditions was described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus[7] (1987). They distinguished between smooth and striated space—where striated space is defined, shaped, and delineated, while smooth space remains open-ended, indeterminate, and adaptable, allowing for unbounded transitions through space rather than prescriptive movement. Function, meaning, and appearance can all coexist in a low-res state.

Phase Shift Park in Taiwan, by Catherine Mosbach, seems to resist clarity and allows for the uncovering of exchange with this airport-turned-park

This approach assumes a more democratic relationship with society. It is the difference between the hierarchical imposition of resolution and the open proposition that allows for a space where mediation may unfold, where participants find their own modes of interpretation rather than stepping into predetermined roles. If co-creation, community-oriented participatory processes in spatial production take place at the beginning of the design protocol—an ambiguous and open-ended experience may carry a similar democratic weight at the end, where engagement does not conclude with the emplacement of a list of demands but continues through interpretation and interaction. In this sense, landscapes that appear unresolved and that resist aesthetic closure may be more socially productive.

A related issue with high-resolution design unfolded when my partner and I engaged an architect to design our future home—a modest, relatively small house. The design protocol moved through several stages, each offering a carefully curated experience communicated through meticulously crafted models and drawings. The main dining table was perfectly aligned with the central window, furniture was arranged to radiate its aura, and there were almost painfully precise collisions of axes. During the design, the architect offered his vision of how I would start the day, sit on a chair, and admire the view through the window—how the family would feel deeply connected with almost no doors. I was being sold an image of my future self.

None of it worked for me. It was too fixed, too prescriptive. If I were to eventually inhabit this pre-constructed stage, I imagined a deep discomfort—almost perversity—as if I were watching myself play the role scripted by the architect, dutifully pleased at having fulfilled the identity imposed upon me. The idea of becoming the figure from the render, actively participating in this preordained mode of dwelling, felt suffocating to the core.

As the process unfolded, I told the architect at some point that he should design our house as if for himself, and we would occupy it in our own way, exercising adaptive reuse the moment it would have been completed. I liked this idea immensely—it created a space where living could unfold on its own terms rather than conforming to predetermined expectations. Intentionally getting it wrong felt more right—infinitely more liberating—than aiming to get it just right.

This raises a collateral but playfully provocative question: Can high-resolution design intentionally function as low-resolution space? Could absolute determinacy, in all its rigidity, paradoxically serve as the ideal condition for adaptive reuse? This possibility suggests another direction for thinking about authorship—not as the imposition of a final form, but as an architectural proposition—in this case, the creation of a structure designed to fail productively, to intentionally betray its identity through a mode of dwelling, essentially to produce a ruin.

American philosopher Todd McGowan, in his book Embracing Alienation[8], explores the relations between identity and subjectivity. Identity, he explains, is a fixed category—one can be a father, mother, student, professor, or any other defined role. Subjectivity, however, acts as a disruptive force—it prevents one from fully inhabiting an identity, or rather, from being only that identity. One is never fully a mother or a father, a student or a professor because subjectivity introduces alienation, a gap that resists complete identification. McGowan suggests that embracing alienation provides fertile ground for emancipation, and he draws on Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič’s sharp assertion that “(Emancipatory) politics begin with the loss of identity, and there is nothing deplorable in this loss.”[9]

If we recontextualise it, we could talk about emancipating landscape into perception—to liberate it from societal norms that keep it in the background. And to let go of resolution so that identity demands renegotiation. Alienation can also refer to not feeling entirely at home in the world, in a situation, landscape, etc. If we can say that alienation is afoot due to climate changing its behaviour, the global weirding, landscape architects are often complicit in covering up the symptoms with green rugs and familiar images. Perhaps it would bear more fruit to embrace this alienation, confront the background in dismay and lose the identity of a designer, pre-wired to harmonizing.

One of the most significant moments in recent decades, where landscape architecture was tasked with actively employing estrangement while engaging with the uncanny tension between identity and transformation, is found in post-industrial parks like Gas Works Park by Richard Haag, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord by Peter Latz, and other similar projects that resemble the clearing in Stalker. Unlike landscapes that appear to be designed from scratch, these sites retain an obvious pre-existing identity—one that is neither erased nor replaced but instead opened up and reconfigured through adaptive reuse and design dialogue. Meanwhile, they generate gaps, distances, and surpluses that don’t make immediate sense.

Often, the pre-existing industrial identity will remain recognisable, serving as an anchor that renders new interventions more tangible. Such an attitude typically makes a special effort to clearly distinguish what existed before from what was added or altered through redesign and how one leaks into the other. In doing so, they function as a framework for “living through the making of the thing”[10]—where the process of transformation becomes perceptually embedded in the landscape itself.

Schalker Verein by Planergruppe presents an ambiguous landscape, estranging the remains of an industrial facility and inviting the audience to renegotiate its meaning and function.

In this context, adaptive reuse serves as estrangement, not solely for didactic purposes but to create a gap between the pre-existing identity and its new appropriation. Hence, the gap itself is the surplus value that unlocks mediation, obstructs high resolution, and intentionally complicates meaning and norms of behaviour. This suggests an unfolding, processual nature of space and architecture’s role in its transformation.

Wagon Landscaping creates perceptual distance, a gap in a historic garden Still Alive—Rocaille Vivante.

The approach of the French architecture office Lacaton & Vassal—‘never demolish, always add’—seems to introduce more architecture for less precision. It is the productive gap that opens up space for interpretation and demonstrates an attitude that seeks to allow rather than command. In their concept of free space, they emphasise space as “free of any programme, eluding a specific defined function, space that avoids rules and regulations”[11].

Social norms dissolve in another type of space; flat roofs can be perceived as liberating, uncoded urban gardens where meaning is not imposed but paradoxically thriving under the appearance of its absence. The film industry and popular culture have repeatedly appropriated these urban mountains as precisely that: spaces of emancipation where doubt, resistance, and transformation take place. It often acts as the set for the climax of a plot. From overcoming lost love in Her (Jonze, 2013), reckoning with life and death in Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987) and Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), to the struggles of the working class and ethnic minorities in West Side Story (Robbins & Wise, 1961), defying oppression in The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994), and to songs like “Up the Ladder to the Roof” by The Supremes, where the rooftop becomes a space for intimacy.

The flat roof is the low-res landscape par excellence—entirely embedded within society, yet simultaneously uncoded and ambiguous. Rooftops, in this sense, become heterotopic[12] thresholds, where identity, function, and perception remain ambiguous and fluid—not fully public, nor private, not fully claimed, nor designed, yet charged with the expectation of social, intimate or cinematic meaning.

While ambiguity foregrounds perception, it may go against concepts such as Genius Loci[13], where micro-local harmonisation blends architectural interventions into the sensible traditions of the site. Low-res architecture, therefore, questions the relevance of Genius Loci in the Anthropocene, a time of overwhelming change, and suspects it of keeping up appearances.

Indeterminacy resists easy recognition, embodying a questioning relationship to identity itself. It serves as a platform where social and environmental processes can be triggered, and through its intentional ambiguity establishes a field of mediation and interpretation. Rather than conforming to expectations, it dissmantles prescribed hierarchies, pre-existing identities, and normative assumptions.

Losing resolution can also offer a fruitful direction for aesthetic decolonization to neutralize highly defined styles, order, harmony, and ultimately unframe the picturesque. It reconfigures the underlying aesthetic coordinate system that slides between the beautiful and ugly, pleasure and discomfort, and emancipates the landscape into a more fluid, queer, and non-binary field, where ambiguity, transience, doubt, contradiction, and alienation are actively embraced. Such reconfiguration radically complicates the perception of the landscape, creating conditions that seek to facilitate political emancipation.

If aesthetic styles normalize perception and act as counter-estrangements—reintegrating landscapes into the habitual—then resisting style itself becomes an act of low-resolution design. It rejects high-definition determinacy, keeping meaning fluid and relational. This aligns with theories of cognitive estrangement, alienation, ontological disruption, and mediated meaning. These theories are, of course, different in methods but converge in their shared resistance to automatisms and passive reception of the world around us. They do not reaffirm but reform. They attack and destabilize meaning, preventing it from collapsing into certainty. A low-res design creates conditions where ambiguity is not an obstacle but a productive tool in reforming perception.

If we accept that aesthetics and politics are inseparable, then the notion of resolution in landscape architecture takes on a deeper significance. The idea that landscapes can be fully “solved” for anyone is a political fiction—an insistence on control where only limited control is possible. Ecological and social conditions are too entangled, too dynamic, too unresolved in themselves for any total resolution to ever be possible, let alone achieved. In this sense, landscape architects do not resolve landscapes—they negotiate them, producing only partial resolutions, contingent and provisional, always incomplete.

Low resolution in aesthetic terms is a choice, a strategy for perceptual engagement that resists immediate recognizability and high definition of meaning. Low resolution in practice, however, is not a choice—it is the limit of what landscape architects can do, a threshold of capacity. This is not a failure but a sober recognition of how things are—messy and impossible to resolve. Low-res operates beyond the illusion of control and instead emphasizes adaptive, relational, and negotiable processes.

The same could be said for the design process. In Stalker, the three men traverse the Zone, navigating an environment that resists logic, where paths shift, rules are unclear, and forces operate beyond their control. They move carefully, responding to conditions as they unfold, never knowing for certain whether their movements are effective or futile. Movement through the Zone is their working condition—not as something to be resolved, but as something to be negotiated.

Krater, emerged from the debris of past pursuits, does not resolve its site but allows processes to play out within it. It neither fixes nor finalizes, but keeps open the possibility of adaptation and transformation. If low resolution invites engagement and unflattens interpretation, it also comes closest to acknowledging the world as it is—unfixed, contingent, and constantly in flux.

Zaš Brezar

note: this article is a continuation and further development of several of my other articles on Landezine and concludes an investigation into the topics discussed.

References

[1] Shklovsky, Viktor. 1917. Art as Device. In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

[2] Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row.

[3] Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso.

[4] Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator uses the pronouns she/her

[5] Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

[6] Tiers Paysage, concept by Gilles Clement, https://www.gillesclement.com/index.php

[7] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[8] McGowan, Todd. 2016. Embracing Alienation: The Political Economy of Psychoanalysis. Albany: SUNY Press.

[9] Zupančič, Alenka. 2017. What Is Sex? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[10] Shklovsky, Viktor. 1917. Art as Device. In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

[11] Lacaton, Anne, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Enrique Walker, and Moisés Puente, eds. Lacaton & Vassal: Free Space / Transformation / Habiter. Madrid: Museo ICO & Puente Editores, 2021.

[12] Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, 1984, 46-49.

[13] Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1980