Jenna Boures
Staff Writer
Andy Warhol is famous for his work with silkscreens, but the pop art aficionado also illustrated his skills via computer screen.
The Daily Mail reported the discovery of Amiga 1000 floppy disks containing Warhol’s digital artwork –including recreations of his iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans as well as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
In 1985, computer company Commodore enlisted Warhol to “demonstrate the capabilities of its new Amiga 1000”, a competitor with Apple’s Macintosh. Video footage shows the artist creating works on the Amiga 1000 along with singer Debbie Harry. Although the footage was common knowledge, the digital art he created was lost for nearly 30 years, found only with the help of The Warhol Archive and a team of specialists.
Watch the footage here:
Warhol fan and “lifelong computer nerd” Cory Arcangel discovered the video on YouTube, spurring the search for the floppy disks.
“In the images,” explains Arcangel, “We see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hand to eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen.”
“It had to be enormously frustrating, but it also marked a huge transformation in our culture: the dawn of the era of affordable home computing.”
“We can only wonder how he would explore and exploit the technologies that are so ubiquitous today.”
The hunt for the floppy disks was captured on film and can be seen in the upcoming documentary Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments in Pittsburgh on Nowseethis.org starting May 12.
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