Short Film Takes You Inside the Recovery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Computer Art

A cou­ple weeks back, we told you how Carnegie Mellon’s Com­put­er Club used its tech savoir-faire to recov­er near­ly 30 paint­ings that Andy Warhol made on the Ami­ga com­put­er back in the 1980s. It involved restor­ing some Ami­ga hard­ware housed at the Andy Warhol Muse­um and then per­form­ing acts of “foren­sic retro­com­put­ing,” which meant reverse-engi­neer­ing the “com­plete­ly unknown file for­mat” in which Warhol saved his images. The Hill­man Pho­tog­ra­phy Ini­tia­tive cap­tured the whole process on film, and cre­at­ed a short movie called Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Ami­ga Exper­i­ments. It pre­miered Sat­ur­day, May 10 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library Lec­ture Hall and it’s also now online. Watch it above. One inter­est­ing thing you’ll learn along the way: Steve Jobs orig­i­nal­ly asked Warhol to make his paint­ings on an ear­ly Mac. But the artist opt­ed for the Com­modore Ami­ga instead. Below, you can actu­al­ly see Warhol paint Deb­bie Har­ry on the Ami­ga.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Find Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Ami­ga Exper­i­ments on our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, part  of our larg­er col­lec­tion: 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.