FLAUNT - The Generation Issue

ART
ANDY WARHOL
Digital Art Pioneer
WRITTEN BY LILY MARSHALL
Around 30 previously unknown works done by Andy
Warhol have been recovered by the Brooklyn-based
new media artist Cory Arcangel. The artist was part
of a team that went digging through Warhol’s old
Commodore Amiga disks, never looked at before,
and discovered some of Warhol’s experiments in early
digital art.
Arcangel, a self-confessed Warhol fanatic, was
browsing YouTube videos of the artist when he came
across Warhol painting Debbie Harry on an Amiga
computer (right.) His interest piqued, he reached out
to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to see if they
had any more of Warhol’s digital artefacts. While the
Debbie Harry picture was in the museum’s collection,
evidence of Warhol’s other computer art adventures
was only found after an extensive search uncovered the
old Amiga and some floppies.
The Amiga 1000 computer might be dated and retro
today, but it was once pioneering technology. Its
manufacturers, Commodore, elected Warhol as the
man to help promote the launch of the Amiga 1000,
commissioning him to create works on the computer. In
order to recover the images, Arcangel enlisted the help
of Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club, a team
renowned for their expertise in dealing with obsolete
computer technologies. Magnetic imaging tools had to
be used to copy data on the floppy disks to ensure that
no damage was done to the original floppies, and the
files were formatted in an unknown format that was not
recognized by any modern utility.
The team managed to crack the antiquated format,
revealing 28 images that hadn’t been seen before – 11
of which were signed by Warhol.
Chief archivist at the Warhol Museum, Matt Wrbican,
wondered how Warhol would have adapted creatively
to the advances in technology that have been made
in the 21st century: “No doubt he resisted the urge to
physically touch 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.”
It isn’t the first time that Cory Arcangel has been
involved with the process of recovering media from
difficult situations – last year he teamed up with
Oneohtrix Point Never to make a track called “Joyvtl
Jvbuayf” that was technically unlistenable, unless you
had the dated software to play it.
Speaking about his hero Warhol, 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, in what then was a
brand-new medium: the digital.”
A documentary about the painstaking recovery process
has been made and will be shown at the
Warhol Museum on May 10, 2014.