It was 1969. Instagram would not be launched for another 41 years, so Andy Warhol was doing the best he could with the available technology, and he was obsessed… obsessed… with Polaroids. ‘Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t.’
Warhol was fascinated with the mechanised industrial reproduction of life: more than a creative theme, it was a tenet of his existence as an artist and as a human being. ‘Machinery had already taken over people’s sex lives — dildos and all kinds of vibrators — and now it was taking over their social lives, too, with tape recorders and Polaroids,’ he wrote in Popism, his memoir of the 1960s. It may be a piece of ex post facto rationalisation too far, but is it possible to hear predictive echoes of our own preoccupation with artificial intelligence?
