Behind Machines

电子设备与孤独感是个很大的话题。Olivia Laing 的 The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone 在讲述 Andy Warhol 的第三章 My Heart Open to Your Voice 里描述和机器产生亲密感、躲在机器(或在今天应当是电子设备)后面的事的 Andy 找到了一个独特的视角。她这样写道

The photographer Stephen Shore remembered being struck in the 1960s by the intimate role it played in Warhol’s life, ‘finding it stunning and poignant that he’s Andy Warhol, who’s just come from some all-night party or several of them, and has turned on the television and cried himself to sleep to a Priscilla Lane film, and his mother has come in and turned it off’.

她这样总结道

Becoming a machine; hiding behind machines; employing machines as companions or managers of human communication and connection: Andy was as ever at the vanguard, the breaking wave of a change in culture, abandoning himself to what would soon become the driving obsession of our times.

这对于当代人和机器的亲密关系可以说洞若观火。以及

Over the years, he employed a range of devices, from the stationary 16mm Bolex on which he recorded the Screen Tests of the 1960s to the Polaroid camera that was his permanent companion at parties in the 1980s.

实在太懂了,让我重新回忆起那切肤一般的拍完一场球赛的孤独感嘛。

但其实更希望、或更好奇看到一层是关于自身的回答,或者说某种程度上已经被回答了:如果 Warhol 生在机器可以被更精确地赋予人格的日子里——早些日子只是编程,今天则是加入 AI ——又会怎样。从个人体验来说(可能过于极端),编程这一语言的习得及其思维方式的养成某些程度上进一步地使得社交的欲望萎缩了——

「Turned on the television and cried himself to sleep」就仿佛 60 年代版电影《社交网络》(The Social Network)开头 Zuckerberg 在愤怒当中写出 Face Mesh 的场景了。让我想到了我也曾有过那些个自暴自弃的当下,敲打着键盘写程序控制自己唯一能稳定操作和驯服其输出的东西的日子。