Decades-old digital works by Warhol discovered

Washington, April 26 (IANS/EFE) The Campbell's soup can and the face of Marilyn Monroe, which inspired Andy Warhol's most famous works, are now followed up by a dozen drawings and photos that the artist created almost 30 years ago on a computer and were never before published.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the artist's home town, unveiled a series of works designed by the father of Pop Art in 1985 on a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer.

Over the past year, members of the Computer Club at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University carried out a complex project to recover the pictures.

"The purely digital images, 'trapped' for nearly 30 years on Amiga floppy disks stored in the archives collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, were discovered and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club," CMU said on its website.

Among the finds were a three-eyed Venus, a can of Campbell's soup sketched with the computer program, and a portrait of singer Debbie Harry, who was the subject of one of the artist's published works.

Warhol conceived these works after signing a contract with Commodore International, which paid him to show what the computer could do in the field of graphic arts, the museum said in a communique.

The project of recovering the computer files began in 2011, when Cory Arcangel, a fan of Warhol's art, discovered a video on YouTube in which the artist is seen using an Amiga 1000 computer to design the portrait of Debbie Harry.

Arcangel facilitated contacts between the museum and the CMU Computer Club.

--IANS/EFE

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