Remember floppy disks? Probably not, but many years ago people used to save .exe and Word files on these massive things, and the ability to take what you needed with you from computer to computer was amazing. The downside to floppy disks is that they became corrupted way too easily and the technology has since died, so finding a way to get your old files these days isn't easy.
Back in the '80s when computers were new and exciting, the Commodore company commissioned Andy Warhol to create some digital art to promote their Amiga 1000. Artist Cory Archangel saw the footage of Andy painting Debbie Harry on YouTube and decided to track down the art. It turns out that the original files were sitting on old Amiga floppy disks, stored as a part of The Warhol archive. Members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club and Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry were able to extract 28 digital images, many of which were in an obscure and outdated format, and 11 of which featured Warhol's signature.
The floppy included a digital painting of a Campbell's soup can, a self-portrait, and a three-eyed Venus portrait, among other never-before-seen works. Matt Wrbican, chief archivist of The Warhol, told The Telegraph that "in the images we see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hard-to-eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen."
The project of uncovering the works will be included in the film Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments, which will be online at NowSeeThis starting May 12.
[via Telegraph]
