Andy Warhol, Andy2, 1985, digital image, from disk 1998.3.2129.3.4. Collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Foundation Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. (c) The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The 2014 recovery of the lost Amiga images created by Andy Warhol suggests lessons about the role of law, economics, and amateurs in preserving works of variable media. This essay by Jon Ippolito is based on his talk given at the unveiling of Warhol's lost digital artworks in conjunction with the screening of Trapped: Andy Warhol's Amiga Experiments, at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh, 10 May 2014. Press release here.
The author is indebted to Golan Levin for broaching the topic and Cory Arcangel and Michael Dille for their insights and contributions. [1]
In Andy Warhol's hands, a facsimile was worth more than the original. His homemade Brillo boxes and hand-painted Campbell's soup labels are treasures coveted by elite collectors. Warhol's most famous lecture was delivered by a look-alike he hired to serve as his surrogate. Even Warhol's piss was valuable, as when he urinated on copper-impregnated canvases to make "oxidation paintings." Eventually he multiplied his own artistic productivity by founding The Factory, where he deputizing collaborators to pee and silkscreen and perform in his stead. The art market didn't blink. Warhol called his studio a factory, but it was more like a copy machine with a Midas touch.
While some artists conceal their sources, Warhol flaunted them, choosing instantly recognizable faces like Marilyn and Mao and serving them up in lurid grids--The Hollywood Squares meets The Clone Wars. He appropriated the most electrifying images of his day--quite literally, in the case of the electric chair--and absorbed their celebrity into his own. When people today see a Warhol Marilyn, they see a Warhol first, and then Marilyn.
Yet Warhol's multiplicity was limited by the analog era in which he lived. Artist's silkscreens are usually produced in limited editions; were they to be produced without an artificial limit, eventually their metal screens would degrade. Digital copies don't. So it's lucky for Warhol's dealers that he died too young to experiment with digital art, because its unfettered duplicability might have thrown a monkey wrench into even the most well-oiled aura machine.
That's the way history and the art market would have remembered Warhol, were it not for a meddling artist named Cory Arcangel.
Known best for vintage game hacks like Super Mario Clouds--a version of the Nintendo classic that removes all gameplay except the pixelated cloud cover scrolling by overhead--Arcangel is one of the first digital artists to have penetrated the staid white walls (or black "media spaces") of the Guggenheim and MoMA. Perhaps because of his sophomoric pranks like Pizza Party--a command-line interface created with Mike Frumin for ordering hundreds of Dominoes pizzas at a time--much of the stuffier art world seems to take Arcangel as a geek ambassador to high culture. It might come as a surprise, then, that Arcangel has an impressive artistic pedigree, from his training in classical guitar to his study of the net art pioneers Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans.
Arcangel was able to put his enthusiasm for art history to good use after stumbling upon a 1985 Commodore product launch on YouTube showing Warhol painting a portrait on a brand-new Amiga 1000. Warhol was an early adopter of silk screens, and here was yet another screen to play with. As one of the few people in the world with an equal appreciation of retro computing and Warhol's Pop Art appropriations, Arcangel inferred that the creations resulting from this experiment must have been stored on floppy disks, and that these could have wended their way to the Warhol Foundation after the artist died.
Arcangel contacted Carnegie Mellon University's Golan Levin, a distinguished new media artist in his own right, and together with Carnegie Museum of Art curator Tina Kukielski and CMU Computer Club mavens Michael Dille and Keith Bare they divulged a hidden side of one of the most well known artists in history. Their remarkable discovery seems to vindicate the conclusion of Matthew Kirschenbaum's 2012 book Mechanisms [2], which argues that forensic techniques have the potential to resurrect seemingly lost digital data, making the ephemeral endure.
While unprecedented from an art historical perspective, the Amiga discovery left the Warhol Museum and Foundation with a dilemma. They could't exactly follow the market assimilation of Conceptual art, which is sold via signed certificates; the images to which Warhol added his pixelated signature will always carry that signature, even when copied.
As copyright forbids the unauthorized duplication of other artistic multiples, Warhol's inheritors could have chosen instead to obstruct any further duplication of the original files by storing the floppies in a vault. [3] This choice might have assigned the works a breathtaking insurance value, but it would also have assigned them an expiration date, as the longer these works remained locked in an obsolete format, the less likely future generations would be able to read them due to bit rot and changing physical media.
Squirreling the floppies away might also have been legally complicated, as technically the Warhol Foundation owns rights to the images but the Warhol Museum owns the floppies themselves. Separate owners of the rights to an artwork's image and the rights to its physical object is not uncommon for analog paintings and sculptures, but in the digital world their longevity is reversed: visual reproductions of the image are likely to be viable long after the floppies they were stored on become unreadable.
The fact that Warhol's neon Debbie Harry and other digital "paintings" appeared in news stories about the discovery from the Huffington Post to the BBC tells us the owners chose a third, more forward-looking path. When Warhol's stewards released versions [4] of these images into the wild, the act suggested that his leap into the digital, however temporary, may also have been a leap out of the art market's traditional mechanisms of value. In doing so, the owners signaled that making the broader public aware of these historic works is more important that attempting to manufacture an artificial scarcity for them. For once the GraphiCraft files on Warhol's Amiga floppies become unreadable, the JPEG of Warhol's three-eyed venus that reporters downloaded onto their hard drive will be as high-quality--and as "original"--as any readable version owned by the Museum and Foundation.
Apart from its momentous significance for art history, the way these images were recovered exemplifies a number of trends in preservation that will only become more prevalent, trends detailed in the book Re-collection by Richard Rinehart and myself. [5] One of them is "proliferative preservation," the dynamic whereby allowing copies to circulate and even mutate in the process better ensures their survival. A pioneer in this movement is the Cooper Hewitt design museum, which recently open-sourced one of its digital acquisitions and put its entire collection on the data-sharing site Github. [6]
Re-collection also examines how emulation--the process whereby a new computer impersonates an older one and therefore can run vintage code--has grown from an experimental technique to the young darling of professional digital preservationists. In this case, a stock configuration of emulators turned out to be insufficient to read the pre-release file types found on the foundation's floppies. [7] Recuperating the Warhol images required not just re-performing its software but its hardware as well. [8] Enter the KryoFlux USB floppy controller, which allows a contemporary PC to hijack a conventional floppy drive and force it to read the magnetic flux transitions on a floppy disk. [9] This gave the researchers raw data to massage into a meaningful image, rather than data pre-interpreted for ancient software that would be unintelligible to today's computers.
The KryoFlux also enabled Dille and Bare to replace Warhol's Amiga floppy drive from the 1980s with a modern PC floppy drive, resulting in a more accurate scan less likely to damage the original floppy. Reading magnetic flux thus helped translate Warhol's digital relics into bits that a contemporary computer can understand, while leaving the relics themselves intact. Combined with the strategy of proliferative preservation, this technique exploits the "both/and" ontology of digital media, whereby you can make a new version without changing the original. If the Sistine Chapel were digital, conservators could clean it and leave it dirty at the same time.
Speculating to the foreseeable future, when most of the world's bits no longer reside on USB sticks and hard drives, reading magnetic flux in the air rather than via a cable may someday became a widespread preservation technique. We already live in a society where watches, refrigerators, and automobile tires acquire and report data about our daily lives. In a recent conversation with Jason Scott of Archive Team, I jokingly asked how soon the Internet Archive would drive around a truck like Google StreetViews to sip magnetic flux from the Internet of things. He replied without skipping a beat: "Give us 20 years."
One last, but important, trend exemplified by this exemplary collaboration is the attention of "amateur" preservationists. Imagine the outcry that would ensue if the restoration of a never-before seen Warhol painting were entrusted to the undergraduate "CMU Conservation Club." Yet it is precisely the amateurs of digital restoration, usually working without any institutional affiliation whatsoever, who are the crack troops of today's battle to rescue digital culture from oblivion.
To be sure, Dille and Bare are amateurs in the same sense Olympic athletes before the professional era were amateurs. Their expertise goes far deeper that of the average tinkerer, even if it's not linked to a day job. Noting the esoterica of chemistry and mathematics found in Wikipedia's crowdsourced articles--which, while not always error-free, are far above the average citizen's grasp of science--theorist Bernard Stiegler coined the term amatorat to identify savants who contribute to an intellectual or creative specialty. [10] As an exemplary member of the amatorat, Dille jokes that a reporter who wanted to talk to the "kids" who uncovered the Warhols never addressed him "Dr. Dille" despite his graduate-level experience with digital forensics.
While dedicated museum staffs have barely managed to resurrect a handful of technologically endangered works in their collections, informal networks of open-source programmers have built hundreds of emulators to access dozens of obsolete computing platforms. Curators and conservators should be handing folks like Dille and Bare a Kryoflux and a hex editor and putting them the front line, for the unofficial paleontologists of the digital era have unearthed and reanimated more fossils of new media than professionals in all the world's museums and archives put together.
Savvy conservators know this already, and there are many ways they can exploit the Internet's Long Tail to find someone with the rare combination of expertise and free time. A library could hold a hacking contest to see who could salvage the contents of a decrepit hard drive. Rather than advertising a position in an email list read only by a closely-knit community, a museum could proffer a small bounty or modicum of fame in a message to a retro-computing forum. [11] In an age of diversifying formats and shrinking institutional budgets, even professionals need virtuosity motivated by passion rather than paychecks.
1. Numerous insights in this essay derive from a conversation with Cory Arcangel, who is perhaps the only person in the world equally qualified to assess the significance of these works for both art history and computer history. See Arcangel's excellent summary, "The Warhol Files," Artforum (New York), (Summer 2014), http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=46874, accessed August 4, 2014. I am also indebted to Michael Dille and Keith Bare for their technical corrections and explanations of their role in the forensic process. You can find a technical summary by the CMU Computer Club at http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_report_v7.pdf, accessed August 6, 2014.
2. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
3. Of course, the copyright status of appropriation art has a checkered legal history, notably in Art Rogers' successful lawsuit against Jeff Koons for having insufficiently transformed Roger's photo in making Koons' sculpture String of Puppies. Closer to home, Maximilian Schich pointed out to me that the "A.H." in Warhol's three-eyed Venus is almost certainly the signature of Avril Harrison, who created demo art for a number of graphic software applications from the 1980s. Private conversation, 25 April 2014.
4. Cory Arcangel rightly points out that the JPEGs released to the press are not technically "copies" as much as migrated versions. For example, the Amiga has non-square pixels, so translating these in a one-to-one fashion to a contemporary screen would have resulted in an image that looked "squished" in one direction. Rendering them as JPEGs with the correct dimensions required transforming the pixels to match the modern aspect ratio.
5. See Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). http://re-collection.net, accessed August 6, 2014.
6. See Sebastian Chan, "Planetary: collecting and preserving code as a living object," Cooper Hewitt museum website, August 26, 2013. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2013/08/26/planetary-collecting-and-preserving-code-as-a-living-object/, accessed August 6, 2014.
7. The CMU forensic team first had to find and extract a pre-release boot ROMs among Warhol's disks, although they later learned those ROMs could be found on the Web with enough effort. Private conversation with Michael Dille, May 13, 2014.
8. Arcangel makes the important point that digital preservation of the kind demonstrated in recovering Warhol's digital art is strongly analogous to a performance, drawing the explicit analogy to graffiti. There is a historical parallel, as artists such as Eryk Salvaggio made the leap from spraycan on walls to pixels on websites. Here graffiti artists piggybacked on a new, more virtual public system of conveyance. (TCP is after all a "transport" protocol.) However, Arcangel's insights into the material form of Warhol's digital experiments suggest this analogy pre-dated the Internet art of the 1990s by a decade. The fact that Warhol wrote his files directly on the GraphiCraft application disks--out of expediency, it turns out, since this pre-release software did not yet have a robust Save As feature--suggests that this assisted readymade might be considered another form of digital graffiti.
9. The Kryoflux is one of several devices that can interface a contemporary computer and outdated disk drives. http://www.kryoflux.com/, accessed August 6, 2014.
10. Bernard Steigler, "Le temps de l'amatorat," Alliage, no. 69 (October 2011), pp. 161-179. http://revel.unice.fr/alliage/index.html?id=3272, accessed August 4, 2014. Roger Malina pointed to the relevance of Steigler's amatorat on the Yasmin list serve, July 5, 2014, http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions.
11. Several of these suggestions come from Michael Dille. Private conversation, May 13, 2014.