Warhol used the Amiga to explore how his familiar artistic style could work in a new digital medium.
In 1985, Andy Warhol experimented with digital art on an Amiga computer as part of a commission from Commodore International. Nearly 30 years later, researchers recovered 28 previously unseen digital images created by the artist from floppy disks stored in the archives of The Andy Warhol Museum. Arcangel first approached The Andy Warhol Museum in 2011 about restoring the Amiga hardware held by the museum and checking whether files could still be recovered from its associated disks.
The recovery project began after artist Cory Arcangel, who described himself as a “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd”, learnt about Warhol’s Amiga experiments through a 1985 Commodore infomercial available on YouTube. The museum said Warhol’s Amiga experiments ranged from simple doodles and photographs of a desktop to digital versions of his familiar subjects. Cory Arcangel said, “What’s amazing is that by looking at these images, we can see how quickly Warhol seemed to intuit the essence of what it meant to express oneself.
His interest eventually led to a collaboration involving The Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon University and the CMU Computer Club. He later worked with Tina Kukielski of the Carnegie Museum of Art, who helped connect the project with Golan Levin, a CMU art professor and director of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. The recovered works show Warhol using digital tools to recreate subjects that were already strongly associated with his art. Campbell’s soup cans, Venus and self-portraits appear among the images. One work from the series, a portrait of Debbie Harry, was already part of The Warhol’s collection.
