In 1985, artist Andy Warhol was commissioned by Commodore, the creator of the Amiga computer, to produce a series of works for the company as a means of generating buzz around the launch of its Amiga 1000.
At the computer launch news conference, Warhol used the Amiga’s graphics program to demonstrate his painting a portrait of Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry.
Self-confessed Andy Warhol fanatic Cory Arcangel learned about this project from a video uploaded to YouTube, after which he began to wonder what the other works, outside the Debbie Harry piece, looked like. When a web search turned up no results, he contacted the Andy Warhol Museum to get permission to search its collection.
During his research, Arcangel came across an Amiga computer and a large collection of floppy disks. Unfortunately, though, initial analysis of the floppies yielded little to show, as the information was saved in an obscure data format that modern Amiga emulators could not read.
To confirm whether or not the works were on the disks, staff and students who are members of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer club assisted Arcangel with cataloguing everything that was on the disks.
That was in 2011.
What followed was a three-year project that saw the group analyze the disks and recover information saved to them. Magnetic imaging tools were used to copy each disk’s data so no damage was done to the original floppies. Examination of the copied data then followed, which revealed file names like “campbells.pic”, “flower.pic”, and “marilyn1.pic”, all names reminiscent of Warhol’s best known works.
The group then reverse-engineered the format and recovered the images.
In total, 18 pieces of work were recovered, a dozen of which were signed by Warhol.
A paper was published detailing the group’s technical efforts.
The discovery / recovery project was filmed for a documentary, which will be shown on May 10 at a public lecture at the Carnegie Library lecture hall in Pittsburgh, PA. It will then be posted online to the site nowseethis.org
Story via bbc.com
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