After Microsoft - Revisiting Bliss
Booting up my virtual PC this morning to test some bugs in Internet Explorer 6, that outdated and decrepit bane of my existence, I sat watching Windows XP chug along as it booted its bloated start up items. Sipping my tea I sat back and contemplated the default desktop image. It's something I've always taken for granted. Pleasing but not challenging, ambient and inoffensive. What were the origins of this image, I wondered? This led to one of my frequent Wiki sojourns, where I discovered the title of the image was "Bliss" and was a photograph of a hill in Napa Valley taken by the photographer Charles O'Rear during a brief respite from the Winter cold. For some odd reason it had never occured to me that this was an actual physical location. After staring at Bliss since installing the Beta of XP on my old HP Pavilion desktop in college, I always took it for granted, assuming that it was doctored or otherwise false.
A few years ago, an art installation was presented in Paris titled "After Microsoft". The artist revisited the same hill in Napa Valley where Bliss was photographed. What they found was a completely changed landscape, immediately familiar. Their research into the origins of the image is fascinating and thought provoking. This is one of the most widely recognizable and infinitely distributed photographs of all time and skewing it as such is strangely jarring.
I love the strange paths Wikipedia leads me down. If I had the option to live on after I die as a brain in a jar with access to nothing but Wikipedia, I'd probably be okay with that.
[link: After Microsoft]
