Lost Warhol originals extracted from decaying Amiga floppies


Golan Levin writes, "My lab (in collaboration with Cory Arcangel, the CMU Computer Club, The Andy Warhol Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art) has announced a major dead-media discovery. We have recovered previously unknown, pure-digital artworks by Andy Warhol — extracted from decaying Amiga floppy disks from 1985."

Warhol created the works with Graphicraft, and the disks needed a lot of love and coaxing to get the files off them (to my mind, the story of the technical heroics is a lot more interesting than the pictures, but I'm not much of a Warhol fan). A documentary film about the file recovery called "Trapped" will premiere on May 10 at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh.


Warhol's Amiga experiments were the products of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Created by Warhol on prototype Amiga hardware in his unmistakable visual style, the recovered images reveal an early exploration of the visual potential of software imaging tools, and show new ways in which the preeminent American artist of the 20th century was years ahead of his time.


Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985

(Thanks, Golan!)