New Artwork By Andy Warhol Discovered On 30-Year-Old Floppy Disks

Andy Warhol, the pop artist of soup can and Brillo pad fame, is back in the news after a team of artists, computer experts, and museum professionals discovered a dozen new works by the artist that have been stored on floppy disks since 1985.

The disks were the property of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the images were rescued from old-school Amiga floppies by members of Carnegie Mellon University's computer club. They wrote up a full report of their process (which you can read here), but their approach boils down to using a USB device called KyroFlux that can connect modern computers with old peripherals:

[KyroFlux] is able to read and write standard-format floppy disks via disk image files, but its primary strength is to capture a very low-level picture of the disks[...] This allows it to better handle and successfully dump damaged floppy disks and those with non-standard encoding or protection schemes.

A documentary of the project's efforts will be shown at CMU on May 10. On to the new pictures!

A new Warhol self-portrait.

The familiar soup can subject returns for a digital portrait.

And here's a three-eyed Venus.

Warhol was no stranger to computer-assisted artwork. Here's video of him "painting" a picture of Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, at the Amiga Commodore launch in 1985.