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Bliss (image) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bliss is the name of the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. It is an image of a rolling green hill and a blue sky with cumulus and cirrus clouds. The landscape depicted is in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States.

Former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format camera while on his way to visit his girlfriend in 1996. While it was widely believed later that the image was digitally manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear says it never was. He sold it to Corbis for use as a stock photo. Several years later, Microsoft engineers chose a digitized version of the image and licensed it from O'Rear.

Gosh, I love the work by Jorinde Voigt so much. 

Aesthetically, it’s very pleasing: Her pictures have a great balance between super delicate lines and big color fields. They appear beautiful from far away and from close up. The lines and the fields fights with each other, but also complement each other: Without one of them, something would be missing in the images. 

Content-wise, I’m a fan, too: In these pictures, I see the conflict between the measured (mostly the big, organic-looking color fields) and the measurement (the lines). Voigt’s work tells stories about the difficulties of explaining an object or process with numbers. One can see the delicate lines struggling; trying their best to describe an object as correct as possible. “Being 100% correct” would mean “being the object”, so of course, the lines (=measurement) fails. The challenge is to come as close to the 100% as possible, without loosing their own character; without loosing their aim of measuring something. But what do they measure exactly? In my opinion, these art works are full of questions about the Why and the How of measuring our world. It reminds me of books like “Technopoly” bei Neil Postman, who raises similar questions.