Picturing Transition: Blue Sky Green Grass
by Yolanda Li

portfolio shortlisted call 'BLURRING THE LINES 2024', 2024

Bliss is a real image taken of a real place in 1996. It is also one of the most viewed photographs in the world since it was bought by Microsoft in 2000 and used as the screensaver for more than 20 years of Microsoft XP's existence. This procession of Bliss, from a blue sky green grass landscape, to a stock-image titled Bliss, to Microsoft's signature desktop image, eventually results in Bliss being more unreal than it is real. Bliss also becomes the referent for such landscapes. Now when one sees a landscape of blue sky green grass, one is reminded of the Window's home-screen. The digital landscape has almost become the original and the landscape, the copy. This era of digital transformation has induced an inability to differentiate between the real, the non-real and the hyperreal, and is transforming societies into a system where we begin to almost prefer the non-real over the real. Bliss, the reproduction, is a landscape where the sky is blue with fluffy clouds and the grass is green with an imaginable smell of wind. This Bliss is eternal and perfect. This Bliss is also a portal to somewhere else. Somewhere to be, to end up. In this way, this Bliss is an old dream but also an advertisement for where we must go and what we must desire. Through searching, constructing, and simulating Bliss or the most blue-sky-green-grass image, this body of work aims to capture a 'blue-sky-green-grass feeling'. A desirable feeling against the perplexity of postmodern digital experience but also a feeling that is ultimately melancholic. I desire blue sky green grass as it offers me an exit out of reality through its perfect eternal qualities. However, I am melancholic in my desire as I realise how nature's beauty has become a violent phantasm, perhaps one that threatens to erase or distort me altogether, projected by digital culture. This phantasm aims to mask the disappearance of nature and our connection to nature as we are told to prefer nature on a screen, or as banners, as reproductions. While 'technologies foster new efficiencies ad possibilities' and 'transform societies and economies', the desired outcome is not all we imagined it would be.


share this page