pouët.net

Just in via Slashdot, some previously unknown Andy Warhol images found on old Amiga disks:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27141201
http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery

ANDY WORMHOL

Haha yeah, I was wondering as well. Even my Xnview can view randomly obscure formats from the Amiga.

http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_report_v10.pdf <- they write something about PLBM without IFF header. That's probably obscure enough for the common art researcher, and "oh, that was easy" for everyone who spent too much time looking at memory hex dumps in the good old days :)

Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga
Nice to see some of his disks survived since back then. :)

haha, i haven't worked on any, i waited for this one :)

He was one of the first demosceners!
True legend!

The story is interesting (digital archeology rocks :), but the actual pictures? Kinda crap, even considering they were made on prototyp-ish hardware and simple MS paint like software.

(and the Warhol paints Debbie Harry thing is hilarious too: Literally three clicks on a screenshot. How can that line-fill be that slow... ;)

make that "total crap", seems the only progress is that he found pattern fill (which also implies the tool he used was above ms paint level, more like dpaint or such)

Da Vinci on Commodore 64.

By Wacek

I still think Warhol is a genius. And him "painting" Debbie was awesome.
Those 3 clicks were priceless but yeah that fill was rather slow.
I think if he was alive in the 90's, he would definetely get into demoscene
as he was always experimenting with different media including music and film.

Forcer: I'd use the word "genius" only for historically exceptional polymath folk. Otherwise, you'd quickly end up with "super-" and "ultra-geniuses".

havoc: The current version of Paint does have a (somewhat limited) pattern fill feature for forms. Some older versions also had one (monochrome dots and lines, I think.) , not that it matters. :)

"A painstaking three-year project was required to recover the images which were saved in an obscure data format." was the laugh of the day for me. Obscure data format my ass. And 3 years for that? Bahahaha!

To be fair, according to the report linked by kb, the actual recovery took ~2 days for 40 disks or so. The rest must've been logistics/politics/bullshit. Or bad reporting. =)

"Obscure data format" is more than enough bullshit already, no matter how long it took to recover the data. :)

Tomaes, OK, I have no issue with defining Andy Warhol's work as MSPaint level junk :)

Forcer, are you on some kind of drugs? I want to try it too because the hallucinations seem to be awesome :P

Yeah, I got them from your mother.

Stay classy guys, stay classy.

You have the manners of a beggar.

"You fight like a cow!"

I see actual cow fights quite often here. Imagine two very overweight people shoving each other around a bit, without removing their hands from their pockets, with lots of waiting around looking sulky in between.

So what was the average graphics quality on the Amiga in '85?

Yeah, this was us, the same crazy people who brought you a Lisa demo, and then when you didn't like the audio, built you a sound card :-) And the images literally were just PLBM without the header, took one of our guys about 5 minutes to figure out. We're not trying to make ourselves out to be mad scientists or magicians or something, we're just retrocomputer guys. This wasn't hard for us, and there are probably thousands of other Amiga nuts that could have done it, we just happen to be in Pittsburgh and the guy at the Studio for Creative Inquiry knew of us from Demosplash (which you should come to when we do it later this year). Also, I don't want to render judgment on the images, or Warhol as a digital artist.

The thing with this kind of project is that art preservation people aren't necessarily computer people, and I don't mean that as an insult to them. They're great at what they studied to do, preserving more traditional art like paintings and sculptures and photographs and such (which is very important work, don't get me wrong), but the field of computer art is just now reaching the point where the preservation question is coming up. The Warhol museum literally had a bunch of floppy disks and Warhol's A1000 chilling out in a box in their archives. I don't think they were really 100% sure what to do with an old computer and some floppies that at first glance looked like pretty uninteresting OS and application disks (coincidentally we now have a bunch of pre-release Amiga software :-P). Think about it this way - your average schmuck probably wouldn't even know how to get files off of a PC-formatted floppy from 1995, which is still in a format that modern Windows (and a bunch of other OSes) can grok - just plug a USB floppy drive into a newer PC and go, providing the disk isn't physically bad.