The Andy Warhol Museum has recovered a series of artworks created by the famed pop artist in the mid-1980s using a Commodore Amiga home computer. Newly retrieved from old floppy disks, they're now available for all to see.
In fact, the images have only come to light because new media artist Cory Arcangel stumbled across a YouTube clip of Warhol using a Commodore Amiga way back in 1985. The video, taken from a launch event for the computer, showed Warhol using the hardware to make digital art. Which got Arcangel thinking: where, exactly, were Warhol's digital images?
Turns out—after a lot of research by Arcangel, curators from the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Warhol Museum's chief archivist—that hidden away in archives were a series of Amiga floppy disks with images on them. With the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club providing old-skool hardware to view the files, they were quickly unearthed.
The result is a series of doodles, photographs, and experiments, all distinctively Warhol: a three-eyed take on Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, a crude Campbell's soup can, and a very quirky self portrait. The images—and the process of retrieving them—are documented in a new exhibition called The Invisible Photograph series at the Carnegie Museum of Art. [The Warhol via Verge]
Images by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.