This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Commodore Amiga. Alongside contemporaries such as macintosh and acorn office computers, the Amiga helped introduce the digital era into houses and played a major role in the PC revolution. Originally billed as a versatile machine oriented towards the company, the Amiga 1000 included a Motorola 68000 16/32 bits processor, some of the most sharp graphics and sound systems of the time, and a multitasking operating system operating on 256 KB of Rom. The Amiga line has become known for its creative capacities, including its abilities to help create video games, illustrations and music.
The cultural impact of the AMINGA has been reinforced by its public flashy celebration, which has become one of the most surreal moments in the history of technology. On July 23, 1984, the Commodore organized a black tie launch event in New York in Lincoln Center, with an orchestra and live hardware demonstrations. The event also included a live art session with Andy Warhol, who used the Amiga to paint a portrait of the Blondie Debbie Harry Frontwoman.
After some initial advice from “Amiga Artist”, resident “Jack Haeger, Warhol started by taking Harry’s” digital snapshot “before covering it with color fillings using the Amiga proenting v27 software – a precursor of illustration programs like MSPAINT.
“Did you find it spontaneous?” Haeger provokes Warhol at the start of the demo.
“Yeah, it’s great. It’s such a good thing,” said Warhol categorically while spectators laughed.
The recording of the portrait session of Warhol lasts only a few minutes, but he marked the beginning of a brand ambassador who lasted until the death of the artist in 1987. In 1985, the Commodore offered an Amiga 1000 in Warhol, which he used to develop a series of virtual drawings, including variations on his famous Campbell’s Soup can, Botticelli’s The birth of Venusand flowers.
In an interview with the magazine Friendly world The following year, Warhol developed more on its interest in dawn of digital art.
“What I like most about this kind of work on Amiga is that it looks like my work in other media,” he said at the time. When asked for his reflections on how computers would affect “mass art as opposed to high art”, Warhol – True to Fashion – is guaranteed to stipulate that “mass art is a high art”.
Although it had thought lost for decades in 2014, the Andy Warhol museum announced the rediscovery of several Amiga experimental projects stored on floppy disks in the museum archives.
“In the images, we see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing coordination with a specific hand -to -hand, now suddenly bound with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several centimeters from the screen,” said the chief archivist of the Matt Wrbican museum. “There is no doubt that he resisted the urge to physically touch the screen – he had to be extremely frustrating, but that also marked a huge transformation of our culture.”
“Do you think it will push artists?” Do you think people will be inclined to use all the different components of art, music, video, etc.? Friendly world The editor -in -chief, Guy Wright, asked during the 1986 interview.
“This is the best part on this. I guess you can … An artist can really do everything,” replied Warhol. “In fact, he can make a film with everything on it, music and sound and art … everything.”
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