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Documenting the Digital Excavation of Andy Warhol's Early Computer Art

A video explains the quest to wake the dead.
Image: Andy Warhol 1985, ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

You gotta hand it to Andy Warhol. The man had timing, even posthumously. His late-career foray into digital art, done on Commodore Amigas, was fresh when it was done in the mid-'80s. After he died, his digital art disappeared before it had opportunity to pass through the uncanny valley of time—the point where something looks dated, but not in a charming way. If you saw his Amiga work in the mid-'90s, the 12-bit colored artwork might've look silly. But when it resurfaced on floppy disks earlier this year, the art and the computers that it was made on looked positively retro-future.

But there's a chance that without the nagging interest of the artist Cory Arcangel, his friends at Carnegie Mellon, and the Warhol Museum's help, the art could've languished as its host floppies collected dust and rotted, never to be loaded again.

Archangel and his friends were just the ones who brought the idea up. But they had the good luck to hook up with the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club, whose interest in old computers and digital archeology brought Arcangel back from the wilderness.

For a thorough oral history of the endeavor and Andy cheerfully painting Debbie Harry, refer to the documentary below, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art. It explains how the project came together and eventually gave the world more Warhol, even 27 years after he passed on—at basically the perfect time, in other words.

Watch Motherboard's interview with Cory Archangel