Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga

The Amiga was presented to the world on 23 July 1985, at a star-studded gala at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, in Lincoln Center, New York ^[1]. Commodore wanted to show that this was a computer for creating, and for that it chose the most famous artist in the city: Andy Warhol ^[2].

On stage, Warhol digitised a photograph of Debbie Harry, the singer of Blondie, who was right there beside him as the model, and set about changing its colours with the ProPaint program ^{[2] [3]}. The result recalled the silkscreen portraits he had made of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. For Warhol, that was exactly what he liked most about art made on the computer: it looked like his work ^[2].

Warhol liked art made on the computer for a simple reason: it looked like his work.

It was not just a night of publicity. Commodore gave him an Amiga 1000 and Warhol became a sort of ambassador for the brand. He kept experimenting, later with GraphiCraft, and made digital versions of his own themes: Campbell's soup cans, flowers, self-portraits and a Venus after Botticelli ^[3]. He also made a short film, You Are The One, with 20 digitised images from 1950s newsreels of Marilyn Monroe; it was lost until 2001 and only shown in 2006, at the Museum of New Art in Detroit ^[2].

Almost 30 years later, the artist Cory Arcangel discovered these experiments in a 1985 Commodore advert on YouTube and, in December 2011, asked the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh whether he could restore the Amiga equipment the museum held and catalogue the disks ^[4]. The reading was done by the Carnegie Mellon University computer club, which used a KryoFlux, a floppy controller that reads the medium at the lowest possible level ^[5]. The file names were promising, such as campbells.pic and marilyn1.pic, but they were in a format no program recognised, and reverse engineering was needed to open them ^[4].

On 24 April 2014 the university announced the result: 28 never-seen digital images, at least 11 of them signed by Warhol ^[4]. Ten disks held images attributed to the artist, and they were converted to PNG files to preserve them ^[5]. The museum's archivist, Matt Wrbican, described them as the work of a mature artist, with some 50 years of hand-eye coordination, suddenly grappling with the strange feeling of a mouse in his hand, several centimetres from the screen ^[5].

The story became a documentary, Trapped: Andy Warhol's Amiga Experiments, premiered on 10 May 2014 in Pittsburgh ^[4], and an exhibition at the museum, Warhol and the Amiga, open from July 2017 to November 2019 ^[3].