Image: Andy Warhol, Campbell’s, 1985, ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum, used with permission.
This article appeared this morning on our beloved sistersite, Motherboard.The world got more Warhols this week, as the 20th century American artist's most futuristic works—by 1985 standards—have been recovered from floppy disks and shared by the Andy Warhol Museum.So strongly associated with the oft-mythologized 1960s, those outside of the art world can be forgiven for forgetting that Andy Warhol lived and kept working until 1987. With a bit of scrutiny, Warhol emerges as a total '80s dude, too: he did commercials for Braniff airlines with Sonny Liston; he showed up in a room with Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Mr. T at Wrestlemania; and now it's clear that he was an early adopter of the personal computer as an artistic medium.Warhol had been gifted a Commodore Amiga in order to demonstrate the computer’s graphic arts capabilities. There's a video of him “painting” Blondie's Debbie Harry, and that piece had been part of the Warhol collection for years. But ever since the museum acquired the rest of Warhol's disks in 1994 as well as his two Amiga 1000 computers, their contents were inaccessible due to the obsolete file format and aging hardware. It took a nagging interest from artist Cory Arcangel, the help of the Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Mellon's Gordon Levin, and the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club, to bring the images back from the digital depths.For the rest of this article (which is awesome) head over to Motherboard.Image: Commodore Amiga computer equipment used by Andy Warhol 1985-86, courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum, used with permission.
