agent
Figure 3: prospect and mystery from an agent’s perspective.
White areas are regions of prospect, which the agent can perceive from its
present point of view. Black rectangles represent obstacles to prospect. The grey
areas that are behind them relative to the agent therefore are zones of mystery,
where the agent cannot foresee what it will encounter when its course of action
leads it there.
horizon recede. This brings us to a second abstract feature that makes landscapes
attractive: mystery [Kaplan, 1988, 1992; Gimblett et al., 1985].
Mystery
In the aesthetics of landscape, mystery has been defined as “the promise of more
information if one can venture deeper into the scene” [Kaplan, 1992, p. 588]. A
typical example of a “mysterious” landscape is a path that bends around an obstacle
so that its continuation remains invisible, or dense vegetation with a hint of a gap
where one might pass through. More generally, mystery is present wherever prospect
is interrupted or obscured by some kind of obstacle (see Fig. 3). However, mystery is
not just the absence of prospect, but the potential to establish an as yet non-existing
prospect. If prospect is anticipation of affordances and disturbances, then mystery is a
second-order anticipation: the prospect of prospect.
Like prospect, mystery is easily generalized from landscapes to more abstract
search spaces and the courses of action that meander through them. In general, a
mystery is a situation characterized by lack of knowledge, but where different clues
hint at the possibility that such knowledge may be obtained given some special effort.
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