Andy Warhol — Amiga paintings

1985

Artists: Andy Warhol · Year: 1985 · Medium: Digital paintings on Commodore Amiga computer — mouse-drawn portraits and still lifes · Substrate: Commodore Amiga 1000 with GraphiCraft software; Warhol's digital portraits of Debbie Harry, still-life compositions, and hundreds of other files saved to floppy disks · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Commodore (promotional event at Lincoln Center) Andy Warhol's Commodore Amiga paintings — produced between July 1985 and early 1986 at Warhol's Factory — are the product of a commercial partnership: Commodore, seeking to market its new Amiga 1000 personal computer, hired Warhol to produce promotional imagery on the machine, photographed him doing it, and distributed the footage as part of the Amiga's launch marketing. The Amiga's built-in ProPaint software, with its 4,096-color palette and then-unprecedented bitmap-painting capabilities, was the medium. Warhol produced roughly thirty digital paintings — portraits of Debbie Harry, Marilyn Monroe, and a series of still lifes — on 3.5-inch floppy disks that Commodore initially archived and then essentially forgot about. The paintings were believed to be lost for nearly three decades. In 2013, an Amiga enthusiast named Matt Wrbican, working with the Andy Warhol Museum and the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club, rediscovered the original floppy disks in the Warhol Museum's study-center collection, and Cory Archangel led a team that reverse-engineered the ProPaint file format on period-correct Amiga hardware to recover the images. The recovered files were published in 2014, nearly thirty years after their creation, causing a brief but intense flurry of press about the rediscovery. What makes Warhol's Amiga paintings belong in this archive is what they disclosed about the Factory's approach to new media. Warhol had been using Polaroid cameras, silk-screen transfers, photography-based imaging, and mechanical reproduction since the early 1960s; the Amiga was a new tool in a continuous practice. The paintings themselves are not formally revolutionary — a Warhol Marilyn remains a Warhol Marilyn, whether silkscreened or painted in Amiga ProPaint — but the fact of them, and specifically the fact of their corporate commission, is an early instance of a commercial-technology company paying a major contemporary artist to produce work on its platform. Every subsequent corporate-artist partnership in the tech industry (Refik Anadol with Google, Beeple with Samsung, etc.) descends from the 1985 Amiga arrangement. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh holds the recovered digital files. Lore Commodore paid Warhol a five-figure sum for the commission — the exact amount is not public — and supplied him with an Amiga 1000 and a ProPaint-equipped monitor at the Factory, along with a technician to sit alongside him during the initial sessions. The Debbie Harry portrait was produced as a live demo at the Amiga's July 1985 launch event at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York; Harry sat for the portrait onstage while Warhol painted it in ProPaint on a digitizing tablet, and the footage became the canonical video document of the project. Warhol was bored by most of the sessions and reportedly delegated considerable execution to his assistants. The floppy disks sat in the Warhol Museum archives until the 2013 rediscovery, treated during those decades as ephemera rather than as primary works. They are now accessioned as paintings. Sources • Andy Warhol Museum — Recovered Amiga Files (2014 release). • Archangel, Cory — "Andy Warhol's Amiga Files" (Post-Digital Publishing Archive, 2014). • Carnegie Mellon Computer Club — Amiga recovery technical report (2013).