Andy Warhol’s mid-1980s art experiments with a Commodore Amiga home computer just surfaced:
It all started with a YouTube clip of Andy Warhol at the Amiga launch event, making a portrait of Debbie Harry. Artist Cory Arcangel saw the clip and embarked on trying to find the images. Working with curators from the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Warhol Museum’s chief archivist, they found Amiga floppy disks. Fortunately, Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club is known for its “collection of obsolete computer hardware” and was able to easily extract many doodles, photographs, and riffs on classic Warhol images like the banana, Marilyn Monroe, and … the Campbell’s soup can.
Archivist Matt Wrbican elaborates (pdf):
In the images, we see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hand-to-eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen. 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.
Watch a video of Warhol painting an Amiga portrait of Debbie Harry in 1985. Check out the other released images here. Update from a reader:
Before Andy Warhol painted on the Amiga, Steve Jobs introduced him to the very first MacBook. At a party at Yoko Ono’s house in 1984. The entire narrative is fascinating – Warhol picks up the mouse and tries to wave it in the air like a paintbrush – only to exclaim emphatically after ‘mastering’ an early version of Paint “”I drew a circle!” A far cry from a iridescent Marilyn Monroe.
(Image: Andy Warhol, Campbell’s, 1985, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visuals Arts, Inc., courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum)
The Dish 