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."