Trapped on Floppies: Warhol's Amiga Experiments
In 1985 Andy Warhol painted Debbie Harry live on a Commodore Amiga. Almost 30 years later, Cory Arcangel helped pull 28 lost Warhol images off his floppy disks.
On July 23, 1985, Commodore launched the Amiga 1000 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York's Lincoln Center. Andy Warhol was on stage with Debbie Harry of Blondie and, in front of the audience, made a portrait of her with ProPaint, software still in testing. Commodore had commissioned him to show what the machine could do. "The thing that I like most about doing art on the computer," he said, "is that it looks like my work."
It wasn't his first try. At Sean Lennon's birthday party the year before, Steve Jobs had shown him how to draw on a Macintosh. On the Amiga he kept going: a Campbell's soup can, Botticelli's Venus, a banana, Marilyn, self portraits. He talked about printing the images as artworks, but it never happened. Only the Debbie Harry portrait became a finished work.
The disks went into the archives of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and stayed there. In 2011, Cory Arcangel, a self-described "Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd," saw the Amiga work in an old Commodore clip on YouTube and approached the museum. With Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club, the team found files named "campbells.pic" and "marilyn1.pic" in a format nothing could open. The Club reverse engineered it, and in April 2014 the museum announced 28 never-before-seen images, at least 11 of them signed.
Flood fills, limited palettes, copy and paste. Warhol picked up the basic moves of digital image making almost as soon as the tools existed.
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