
Inside the Recovery of Andy Warhol's Lost Computer Art
In 1985, Andy Warhol sat down at a Commodore Amiga 1000 to demonstrate the machine's graphics software, digitizing a photo of Marilyn Monroe and painting over it with the same bold color-blocking he used on canvas. The floppy disks holding that work and dozens of other experiments sat forgotten for decades until Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Club, working with the Andy Warhol Museum, tracked them down and figured out how to read obsolete Amiga file formats without destroying the data. This short film follows the club's members through that recovery process, showing the specialized hardware and software archaeology needed to pull nearly thirty images off disks never meant to last this long. Warhol treated the Amiga as just another canvas, reworking Campbell's Soup cans and self-portraits in pixels the same way he reworked them in silkscreen, and the recovered files are the only surviving record of that work. The film is as much about digital preservation as it is about Warhol.