Documentary of Recovery/ Discovery of Andy Warhol Amiga Art screened @ CMU

Warhol nuts, Art lovers and tech history geeks may be interested in this film that takes us back to the early dawn of computer graphics programs.

From The Computer History Museum

"Less than a year later, Commodore launched the Amiga 1000 personal computer. The launch was held in the Vivian Beaumont Theater, a part of New York’s Lincoln Center. It attracted not only the typical technology crowd, but also those interested in music, film, and art. The Amiga 1000 was being positioned as a ‘multi-media’ computer, usable in many fields of creative endeavor. Apple’s Macintosh had launched a year earlier and was already starting to gain a following among the arts and design communities. Launching a computer at a major cultural venue was still somewhat new, but the scope of the introduction was on-par with the Macintosh introduction the previous year. One of the highlights of the event was the creation of a piece of art live, on stage.

Andy Warhol was the creator.

The subject of his work? Debbie Harry, best known for her work as the lead singer in the seminal New Wave band Blondie.

The creation began with Warhol capturing an image of Harry and then manipulating it, using ProPaint, a paint system that was still in the early stages of testing. A photograph of Harry was digitized and Warhol manipulated the colors of the image using ProPaint. The resulting image was quite similar to the silk-screened images Warhol created of stars such as Monroe, Elvis, and Liza Minelli during his heyday."

Contemporary, technology artist, Cory Arcangel discovered a then obscure, YouTube Video online of  Warhol creating an image of Debbie Harry and pushed to find the floppy disks.

As you might guess, CMU students helped recover the images.



From CMU's Studio For Creative Inquiry 

"The team’s efforts are documented in the Hillman Photography Initiative’s new short film, “Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments.” Trapped will premiere at 7 p.m., Saturday, May 10, at Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh. The screening will be followed by a conversation with some of the team’s key players, including artists Arcangel and Levin; Michael Dille, who just completed his Ph.D. in robotics at CMU, and Keith A. Bare of the CMU Computer Club; and outside guest Jon Ippolito, a professor of digital media curation at the University of Maine. The Trappeddocumentary will be available online at http://nowseethis.org on May 12."

Cleveburgh College List

I'm trying to show on the sidebar a somewhat complete list of the colleges in or very near the "Cleveburgh region" I mentally mapped earlier. It's far from complete, in that I won't list every small branch campus or community college, however vital they may be.

This rich regional asset base, few areas in the entire country can match puts lie to the image of us as a dumb poor area ill suited to the new high skill age. It also, raises the questions--why are we not getting more bang for the buck from these institutions and are they even socially relevant to the "average Joe"? If not, why not?

It's not a joke or something that can be avoided for any school that wants to survive and thrive or for the communities they are in and near.

Antioch College was a private, independent liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was the founder and the flagship institution of the six-campus Antioch University system. Founded in 1852 by the Christian Connection, the college began operating in 1853 with the distinguished scholar Horace Mann as its first president. The college's educational approach blended practical work experience with classroom learning, and participatory community governance. Students received narrative evaluations instead of academic letter grades. The college's enrollment during the last academic year that it was open for classes (2007-08) was fewer than 200 students.

Not surprisingly, major Venture Capital Firms don't consider either Pittsburgh or Cleveland to be worthy of massive interest. But clear mental maps of the wider region could change that. Pull back a little further and there is The Washington megaplex and the emerging Toronto super region.

By, the way-- Sharon, Youngstown, Warren and Akron form the center of the map, right on or near I 80.