Andy Warhol, that cyborg, was the messenger who got shot. He lived long enough, however, to participate in the early moments of the computer explosion, commissioned by Amiga to create a digital portrait of Debbie Harry. The fascinating visual artist Cory Arcangel has recovered some of Warhol’s other Amiga art. From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian:

“Thanks to the curiosity of Cory Arcangel – one of today’s most important artists working with digital technologies – a forgotten hoard of Warhol artworks has been rescued from old Amiga disks by students who ingeniously hacked into the defunct software.

The works Warhol created to commission in 1985 to help launch the Amiga 1000 computer are not earth-shattering in themselves. He essentially recreated some of his paintings as digital images.

But the meeting of Andy Warhol and a computer at the dawn of the digital age is hugely suggestive. Warhol, after all, is the man who flirted with being a machine. He wore a metallic silver wig and made paintings on a production line, with assistants silkscreening found photographs onto canvas.

This computer-like style was eerie. Yet it was not the real him. In reality, Andy Warhol was a talented draughtsman, a secret Catholic and a compassionate historian of his times. He pretended to be a machine because that was the best way he found to capture the way the world was changing. From canned soup to instant pictures, Warhol took the pulse of the age as America became a society of consumers and celebrity watchers. He portrayed reality so truly he seemed to invent it – as if one artist could create the celebrity age.

Warhol was a reporter who simply told the truth.”