Previously Unknown Warhol Works Recovered From '80s Amiga Disks

First time accepted submitter mooterSkooter (1132489) writes "Magnetic Imaging tools were used to recover a dozen images produced by Andy Warhol on his Amiga computer. I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself." Read more about it from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, which says "The impetus for the investigation came when [artist Cory] Arcangel, a self-described “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd,” learned about Warhol’s Amiga experiments from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch. Acting on a hunch, and with the support of CMOA curator Tina Kukielski, Arcangel approached the AWM in December 2011 regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum’s possession, and cataloging any files on its associated diskettes. In April 2012, he contacted Golan Levin, a CMU art professor and director of the FRSCI, a laboratory that supports “atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional” arts research. Offering a grant to support the investigation, Levin connected Cory with the CMU Computer Club, a student organization that had gained renown for its expertise in “retrocomputing,” or the restoration of vintage computers."

Comments

Re:1985

[Galaga88]

They introduced a new feature in 2015 that allows broadcasts to be sent back in time.

However, due to a lightning strike, it got stuck on 1885 after sending only a few videos back to 1955.

Amiga Floppies

[tekrat]

They could have just used the disk drive. 99% of my Amiga floppies still work just fine.

The Amiga 1000 was a surprisingly durable machine, and frankly, Commodore, despite anything you could say about them making "toy" computers at a target price used very high quality components.

A modern PC's power supply will burn out long before a 25-yr old Commodore power supply will.

Re:Amiga Floppies

[Kl00dge]

You apparently never had to put your C64 power supply in the refrigerator.

Re:Amiga Floppies

[mooterSkooter]

Exactly what I thought. I would have just tried the disk in an Amiga with a HD attached, made an image and copied that over to try out in an emulator. Magnetic Imaging devices indeed! Well, makes for a more interesting story I suppose.

Re:Amiga Floppies

[bws111]

I hope your not an archeologist or forensics expert. The first thing to be concerned about, when dealing with a one-of-a-kind artifact, is to minimize any POSSIBLE (not probable) damage. There is a non-zero probability that using a disk drive could cause damage. There is less of a possibility that magnetic imaging would cause damage.

Re:Amiga Floppies

[timeOday]

My (parents') Amiga 500 died half a dozen times from electrostatic discharge. Ultimately we made a mat to sit it on, out of cardboard wrapped in foil and wired to the wall outlet ground. You would spark yourself on the mat before using the computer.

Re:Amiga Floppies

[DerekLyons]

A modern PC's power supply will burn out long before a 25-yr old Commodore power supply will.

Nonsense. Back in the early 90's I sold consumer electronics for a living, and we did a brisk business in aftermarket and grey market power supplies for various Commodore machines - because the stock power supplies burned out with depressing regularity and stock replacements were expensive and difficult-to-impossible to obtain from official sources.

Re:Amiga Floppies

[Sipper]

I've heard of drilling through the potting material to remove and replace a fuse buried in there, but never that. What was the hope behind the refrigeration of the "brick"?

Yes, the C64 power supply was potted -- and after digging through it what had to be replaced wasn't a fuse, it was a 5v linear regulator. The problem with the C64 power supply was that the Linear regulator was designed for 1A, but Commodore was using it to pass 1.2A. This shortened the life of the part, and when it failed it required a huge effort to dig through it to find the part that was bad and replace it.

But I did exactly that. And unfortunately one generally had to do that if they wanted to end up with a reliable supply, because the replacement supplies had the same design flaw and would thus fail in the same way. Once I replaced the 5v regulator with one that was rated for 1.5A, it never failed again. :-)

Re:Amiga Floppies

[Sipper]

You apparently never had to put your C64 power supply in the refrigerator.

The C64 power supply used a 5v linear regulator rated for 0.2A - 0.3A less current than the C64 itself drew through it, so the part would have premature failure because it was underrated. Apparently/supposedly the difference was expected to be dumped as heat, and the supply was potted which made it very difficult to get to the part that failed and replace it... but doing so was necessary because the replacement supplies had the same design flaw. I did that replacement and after doing so the power supply looked terrible (I left it ripped open), but with a linear regulator that had a sufficient current rating it never failed again (whereas the replacement supplies all did).

Putting the power supply in a refrigerator sounds terrible (but dedicated), but then, so was the "correct" fix. ;-)

Re:Amiga Floppies

[Darinbob]

Control is SUPPOSED to be where the capslock is now, it was the universal standard! The idiot that changed the position is still in hiding in the witness protection program!

Re:Amiga Floppies

[amigabill]

Also, if they did much research, they might have found that one of the few remaining Amiga hardware peripheral producers has for some time sold floppy disk controllers that I understand are popular with Forensics people, as they can read a very wide variety of formats on a standard PC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Catw...

Re:1985

[Anonymous Coward]

from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch

I didn't know YouTube was around in 1985

It wasn't. That is why it says "from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch" and not "from the 1985 YouTube video of the Commodore Amiga product launch"

Plastic "art"

[hessian]

The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.

His commentary on crass commercialism basically became crass commercialism itself. Why shouldn't it? It was the same basic idea.

As a wise man once said, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

Re:Plastic "art"

[CastrTroy]

From looking at the "art" it looks to have little artistic value. Warhol didn't have any particular skills in computer art, and the software was quite limited in what you could do at that time. It's nothing that anybody else messing around with the same program couldn't have produced. Just because Warhol is a notable artist, does not mean that every piece of art he produced is worthy of our attention. Some people are great authors, but that doesn't mean their shopping lists or twitter posts, are literary works to be cherished.

Re:Plastic "art"

[jrumney]

From looking at the "art" it looks to have little artistic value. Warhol didn't have any particular skills in computer art, and the software was quite limited in what you could do at that time.

I think you'd appreciate them a little more if you were old enough to remember just how limited the graphics software of the time was.

Re:Plastic "art"

[mcgrew]

The Amiga and its demo scene were more art than Warhol ever will be.

So, you hold a PhD in art history? Or have you ever taken a single entry level art history class?

The first question was sarcasm. I did, in fact, take an art history class in college. Your uneducated opinion of art is as bad as an art historian's knowledge of quantum physics, which is somewhere between "very little" and "absolutely none".

A man once said "Be silent and thought a fool. Speak and remove all doubt."

Re:Plastic "art"

[TangoMargarine]

Your uneducated opinion of art is as bad as an art historian's knowledge of quantum physics, which is somewhere between "very little" and "absolutely none".

Except for the tiny fact that art is wholly subjective and quantum physics is wholly objective, sure.

Re:Plastic "art"

[517714]

Warhol was mostly marketing, like Kim Kardashian with a paint brush.

But you challenged us to read, so from Wikipedia:

"New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on pop art in December 1962 during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture."

"In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects. They also criticized his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, entitled Jewish Geniuses, which Warhol-who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews-had described in his diary as "They're going to sell."

"The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), 'Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.' "

I believer it is the opinions of those critics and reviewers which have stood the test of time, not Warhol's artistic works.

Editorializing

[Nimey]

I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself.

Possibly that's because you're an idiot. Floppies and drives degrade just like everything else and taking these extraordinary measures gives a better chance of not permanently damaging something priceless during recovery attempts.

Re:Editorializing

[Nimey]

Do any of your random old floppies hold the only known copies of works by a major dead artist? Wanker.

Re:Editorializing

[Nimey]

but if the disk was properly stored and was of a good brand

If.

This is pretty typical of Slashdot, really: technical people with some education second-guessing people who do $THING for a living even though they don't have the same knowledge of the field or the circumstances, but by $DEITY they're smart people and they know things, so they're instantly armchair experts.

Re:Editorializing

[Rob the Bold]

If.

This is pretty typical of Slashdot, really: technical people with some education second-guessing people who do $THING for a living even though they don't have the same knowledge of the field or the circumstances, but by $DEITY they're smart people and they know things, so they're instantly armchair experts.

This isn't limited to the technical community. Doctors are pretty bad about this too. Particularly in regard to the field of finance: some of them should practically hang out a "Scam Me" sign. I'm sure there are "Modern Major Generals" in almost any field who feel -- incorrectly -- their own expertise and success in one field should make equally competent in anything.

Re:1985

[Richy_T]

That long ago? It was probably called YeTube.

My name is Andy Warhol

[Bender Unit 22]

and I just learned to use flood-fill.

Editors please do your job

[cdrudge]

CMOA? AWM? CMU? FRSCI? Identifying what an acronym stands for is very helpful when the acronym isn't very well known. Yes I know I can read the article and try to find it out, but it's helpful for summaries too.

In case anyone else was wondering:
CMOA - Carnegie Museum of Art
AWM - Andy Warhol Museum
CMU - Carnegie Mellon University
FRSCI - Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry

What not to do

[Rob the Bold]

You've just found an undiscovered work by Andy Warhol. Do you want to:

1. Wipe it down with Pledge(TM)?

2. Call an appropriate professional for advice?

Because I'm pretty sure that . . . "I would've just stuck the disks in and tried to copy it myself" . . . is the physical artifact equivalent of using some randomly chosen household cleaner. And museum curators are pretty anal about curation of their stuff.

Also, for the love of God, do not use "DiskDoctor"!

Re:What not to do

[Nimey]

Let me see... I last used a floppy a couple years ago and it was basically single-use: wrote data to it once, got it back off once, then Bad Sector City. Most of that 10-pack of floppies was the same way.

Granted "modern" 3.5" floppies are much lower quality than what we had in the '80s but your assertion that floppies never break is stupid.

Re:What not to do

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I had a failing drive that would eat disks.

The thing about being anal retentive about preserving the data is that you don't want to be the jerk who ruined a priceless warhol artifact by having an incredibly unlucky day.

Re:What not to do

[Nimey]

Do your archives contain anything of consequence? These are the only known copies of works by a major dead artist, they're worth taking extra precautions over that your old 16-color horse porn doesn't

Re:What not to do

[Nimey]

But if it works then you've proven you're smarter than everyone else, and that's obviously more important.

Reverse engineer the format???

[LWATCDR]

Odds are very high that they where IFF. Commodore created a universal documented format container called IFF back in the day. The Graphics version was completely documented and is evens still supported by a lot of graphics programs.

Re:Reverse engineer the format???

[RJFerret]

It was said in the BBC article emulators couldn't load it, and considering GIMP loads IFF, and he had a pre-release Amiga 1000 with unreleased software, it's entirely possible it was from before the Interchange File Format was standardized.

Sure enough, turns out to be the case, paraphrased from the PDF linked above, An older format deprecated by 1990 was called PLBM (PLanar BitMap, compared to the ILBM interleaved bitmaps you might recall as typical IFF). This format is much more poorly (sic) documented. One disk contained an EA slidshow of PLBM files. A pre-release version of Graphicraft, as well as the A-squared framegrabber both produced what they dubbed a "Graphicraft format", essentially an uncompressed PLBM without an IFF header. All the files found in that format contained at most 32 colors.

Per those commenting on robustness, 40 disks, 4 had bad sectors, 9 had file system issues. Half of those impacted files/used space.

Well, there goes ...

[PPH]

... his 6.44E9 CPU cycles of fame.

Are you sure?

[Tablizer]

When you only have 16 colors, everything looks like a Warhol work.

Re:uh..really?

[synthesizerpatel]

http://amiga.filfre.net/wp-con...

There's the original. I was wrong, it wasn't a full reproduction - but it was a Deluxe Paint marketing image for sure.

Wow, that was a lot of trouble to go through...

[aflyingcat]

Seriously ? They could have just asked. They didn't have to go to all that trouble to recover the images. Not only were there backup disks made at the time, but the images were converted and stored as IFF files after the Amiga's launch. I know a few ex-Commodore people who have signed backup disks from Warhol from the training sessions for Warhol, and from the launch itself. The graphics program he used at the launch was an early beta version. It had a more than a few bugs. Area fill in particular was a problem. Before we launch , we went over with him about what not to do during the launch demo. And of course, he completely forgot during the presentation, and went right for that button. Our rows went entirely silent when he hit that button :-) It was a major relief when the program did the fill and survived. There was a plan B, fortunately, it was unnecessary.