Museum discovers digital Andy Warhol art on Amiga floppies

Photographs, doodles, and graphics created by famed artist Andy Warhol have been discovered on a number of old Amiga floppy disks. The digital artworks are said to have been made in the eighties on an Amiga, in collaboration with Commodore.

In 1985, Commodore International engaged artist Andy Warhol to show the graphics capabilities of the Amiga 1000 to the public. During a press event where the new Amiga hardware was shown, Warhol made several adaptations of images of American singer and actress Debbie Harry. The final artwork is on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, but the digital files Warhol worked with were untraceable.

That all changed in 2011 when an artist came into contact with a curator and archivist from the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club. The parties decided to analyze a number of floppy disks from the museum’s archive with potentially interesting content. Initially it appeared to be application discs, but Warhol had indeed saved his own work on the floppies.

The help of the Carnegie Mellon Club, which includes students involved in ‘retrocomputing’, proved much needed: old hardware and specialized software was needed that could read the old file formats on the vulnerable floppy disks without damaging the carriers. After an extensive and lengthy analysis of the data on the Amiga floppies, doodles, photos and images were found. Among other things, the world-famous Campbell soup cans digitally edited by Warhol surfaced, as well as a self-portrait.

Warhol experimented with a variety of media during his lifetime as an artist, including computers that were booming in the 1980s. In his work on the Amiga’s, the pop art artist made extensive use of copy/paste techniques and filling in areas with patterns.