Art snoopers found some original digital artworks by Andy Warhol on some old format floppy disks. Commodore called on Warhol to promote their Amiga 1000 back in the mid-80s when they were competing with the Macintosh series from Apple. Maybe Commodore is currently a behemoth tech company in an alternate universe. We knew this artwork was created because there is footage of Andy tinkering on an Amiga 1000 with Debbie Harry for a promotional event. Artist Cory Arcangel initiated the search when he became obsessed with the YouTube footage of Warhol on the Amiga, and figured that the files had to be saved somewhere, and he was right. Researchers found the old disks in the Warhol Archive and hired the best hackers in town to extract the data.
Dozens of artworks were unearthed including the experimental self-portrait and Campbell Soup Can composition that you see below. It’s interesting to see such an established artist take on a completely new way to create art and dive into it. I’m sure he would’ve stayed at the forefront of technology and continued to experiment. I wonder what he would’ve done with an iPad. The image recovery process was filmed for an upcoming documentary titled Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments.
