The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has just announced the discovery of multiple lost art pieces created almost 30 years ago by Andy Warhol. These images had been saved to a floppy disk that sat on museum shelves for three decades until a recent successful recovery attempt.
Members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer club and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry are responsible for the extraction of the images from the obsolete Amiga floppy disks. This computer club has a large collection of obsolete computer hardware, and used custom software to recover Warhol’s artwork from the disks.
Commodore International had commissioned Warhol to develop art using their Amiga computer hardware, and this artwork varied in style and type. Portraits, doodles, early digital camera shots, and experiments with variations of Warhol’s classic pieces were all found on the disk. A notable piece is a modification of a Botticelli painting of a Venus, however Warhol’s version gives the woman an extra eye.
The floppy disks had been in the museums collection since 1994, however were inaccessible due to the images being saved in an obsolete format.