19 ms·

Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985 (2014)

148 points by ForHackernews 9y ago

baldfat 9y ago
I define myself as a former Amiga owner. That computer was so defining and the community so strong sad that Jack Tramiel went out to kill the Amiga with the Atari ST. These Andy Warhol pictures were a claim to fame for many Amiga owners and it was awesome to know that they were found right next to the bouncing red and white ball. It must have taken around 6 or 7 years for the Macintosh and "IBM PC" computers to catch up. The graphic art capacity was head and shoulders about anything else outside of Silicone Graphics. Not to mention that VIM was developed on the Amiga. I had a audio port so I could record through RCA cables and remix things. My church had the Video Toaster which was in use from 1987 to 2004. This actually led to me doing a lot of audio and video work that I still do today. In the future I think the hardware architecture will resemble more of the Amiga as we hit the limits of computer chips. There will be more dedicated chips and cores for more specific things.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  We've already seen the resurgence of heterogenous computing on the iPhone. The SoC inside offloads video and voice processing to dedicated ASICs. When you call these functions on the API, they run on the ASIC, not on the main CPU.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Video processing has been offloaded in PCs for a long time; the first "3D accelerators" were in the late 90s.
    - ashleyn 9y ago
      Perhaps I meant to say image processing. The ability to point the camera at something and make sense of the picture (FaceID, AR).
    - MisterTea 9y ago
      > the first "3D accelerators" were in the late 90s. You forgot about SGI and I'm sure a few others like Intergraph who were doing dedicated 3D video pipelines in hardware starting in the in the 80's.
      - baldfat 9y ago
        Actually the Amiga had a GPU for 2D graphics. You need a Amiga desktop model and not a A500. The graphics shop down the road had a dozen Amigas with these cards for rendering and even ray tracing. They were pretty amazing. Even Disney used them for Beauty and the Beast and other animation at the time. http://www.amigareport.com/ar216/p1-7.html http://www.amigareport.com/ar216/p1-7.html
        D_Guidi 9y ago
        really? Pretty sure OCS was the same in all Amigas
  - xxs 9y ago
    Back in the 80s there was a co-processor known as 8087 and it was a different beast than 8086/8088. I had a computer with two different CPUs 6502 and Z80 that could actually ran them in parallel. There is nothing new about the ability to have some functionality offloaded to another processing unit regardless of the architecture.
    - MisterTea 9y ago
      The 8087 was the floating point co-processor or FPU for the 8086. It was not a separate CPU.
      - 13of40 9y ago
        The blitter, raster, and audio coprocessors on the Amiga weren't Turing complete general purpose CPUs either.
        MisterTea 9y ago
        The 8087 FPU was not offloading the CPU as the CPU was halted after the FPU caught a FP instruction and made a DMA call to the CPU and took control of the bus to access what memory it had to. They were a tag-team if you will; jumping in and out of the ring to deal with their respective instructions.
        13of40 9y ago
        I believe Agnus(?) and the CPU had to wait on each other for the memory bus - as evidenced by the CPU getting slower when the screen resolution was increased, due to the greater amount of video memory being read per frame.
        xxs 9y ago
        Halted? You had an option to WAIT for 8087 but you could 'cheat' and just run other instructions, manually calculating cycles. Thus, a system with an 8087 was capable of true parallel processing, performing one operation in the integer ALU of the main CPU while at the same time performing a floating-point operation in the 8087 coprocessor. Since the 8086 or 8088 exclusively controlled the instruction flow and timing and had no direct access to the internal status of the 8087, and because the 8087 could execute only one instruction at a time, programs for the combined 8086/8087 or 8088/8087 system had to ensure that the 8087 had time to complete the last instruction issued to it before it was issued another one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087#Design_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087#Design_and_developm...
- megaman22 9y ago
  I'm not sure. Heterogeneous architectures were a huge mess with the PS3, for a recent example, and abandoned in the subsequent PS4 for relatively standard x86 kit. Taking advantage of specialized hardware is not without its costs.
  - ashleyn 9y ago
    It depends on the API implementation, really. The criticism back in the day was that Cell was difficult to program for. I would imagine this was because its functions were at a lower level, which buys you power at increased development cost. Think the difference between Vulkan and OpenGL. Sony didn't seem to value development value over capability, which led to the PS3 earning the reputation of being an underutilised console: https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on-purpose/ https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on... Apple's heterogenous computing functions on iOS are higher-level and much easier to use. Instead of manually writing code to do FaceID on iOS, possibly involving graduate-degree levels of theory, you simply create a biometry type which abstracts much of the details, many of which developers aren't particularly interested in fine-tuning. This is how someone on a budget like Bank XYZ can use FaceID to unlock your bank app.
    - RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
      Another angle worth considering is the economics of porting titles. If you take full advantage of specialized hardware like the PS3 had, it could have a strong influence on the implementation of games- possibly even pushing down to choices in aesthetics and game mechanics. As a result it may be very difficult to get a comparable experience on another console. If a game is designed and written to more-or-less cater to a common denominator it is more straightforward to later port the game to other consoles or PCs- including platforms that might not exist at the time the original game was created- and mop up sales from those other userbases.
      - Narishma 9y ago
        I'm not sure I agree. It was much easier to develop your game around the PS3's heterogeneous architecture, then port it to a more conventional architecture like the Xbox 360 or PC and get good performance than doing it the other way around.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  The first college I went to wouldn't let me in as a CompSci major because that program was full. But it had a TV station with an Amiga and Video Toaster that nobody knew how to use, so I was enrolled in the journalism school so I could run it for them.
MrJagil 9y ago
>Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, I wonder what format it was...
- ealexhudson 9y ago
  They don't really say very much. The Venus bitmap was a demo picture that shipped with Deluxe Paint (and the one they've published seems to be blank where the header/toolbox would be), and although they credited it to Warhol it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in. If these were system disks from a prototype Amiga, then it makes sense that these pictures came from an early version of Deluxe Paint, and that .pic was some intermediate / temporary / memory-dump type format before they adopted the .iff system. Given the Amiga was quite different display-wise, a description of the file format would probably be quite instructive in terms of whether it was an Amiga-native data structure or something already existent somehow.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    He used GraphiCraft for the demo, but of course it's possible he at some point later used DPaint. I do believe the reason GraphiCraft is present in the images, though, is because GraphiCraft early on did in fact use pretty much a memory dump. Several of the early graphics programs in fact didn't store a separate full copy of the bitmaps, but let you draw directly into an window on the screen, and relied on AmigaOS to preserve any sections temporarily covered by other windows. But DPaint at least let you paint under the title bar. Later versions of GraphiCraft did use IFF, as Commodore wholly embraced the format once EA released it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - toyg 9y ago
    > it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in. To be fair, that third eye changes the picture in a very significant way, in artistic terms. Art is not about quantity of effort.
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
The Venus image was one of the ones bundled with Deluxe Paint, Just seems he's duplicated the eye. Feels we might be attributing a mistake as a conscious piece of art.
- supergreg 9y ago
  So it's a remix. What was that about good artists steal?
  - vidarh 9y ago
    It's a remix with a single cut and paste.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      This is an artist who signed soup cans. I'm sure he'd tell you something like there is no difference between accident and art when done by an artist.
      - fsloth 9y ago
        This is one way to view artist - not as a craftman, but as a brand like Walt Disney (or Merceded Benz). The artist then functions as a curator for all the data that passes through him and signs those articles he considers worthy of the brand. This is a totally fine way to look at it - just as long as he/she does not tread on someones copyright.
        toyg 9y ago
        > not as a craftman, but as a brand That's reductionist. Warhol's craft was in recognising and willfully exploiting brand culture. He described the celebrity culture we now live with, and made a job out of being the one who understood how it worked. He wasn't just signing "worthy" stuff; he was showing people how the mechanisms of brand-building and celebrity culture actually work: by repetition and labelling/signing/appropriating. He branded the brands like brands branded the world, and he did it over and over with minor variations, exactly like they do. He was not without his flaws, but he wasn't just some sort of "gatekeeper of cool". He obviously didn't think an artist exists to validate this or that brand; the validation was a side-effect of his artistic craft. This is why trying to "play Warhol" today, using different brands or imagery, is just stupid, in artistic terms: he's done it already, it's all there already and there is nothing else to say on that particular subject.
_pmf_ 9y ago
I sense fraud.
- vidoc 9y ago
  I'm not sure actually, i have my own doubts but I have to admit the entire absence of artistic talent makes suspect it might actually be legit!
- monocasa 9y ago
  There's videos of him making it. It was a publicity stunt for Amiga at the time.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
Really crazy. The first one gives off a strong vaporwave vibe. Really weird how that works out.
- culot 9y ago
  It's 1985, so that's not weird at all.
- brandonmenc 9y ago
  Art made in 1985 looks like art made today that is made to look like it was made in 1985 - shocking.
mwexler 9y ago
The PDF report gives some fascinating technical detail, linked in the article and at http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_report_v10.pdf http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_repo...
bwldrbst 9y ago
I've got a few Amigas and my 6 year old son loves messing about in Deluxe Paint. Some of his creations are starting to approach Warhol's level... I think...
indescions_2018 9y ago
Part of CMOA's wonderful Invisible Photo doc: http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto Amiga games are so important to the history of game development and design. Could the brand could be resurrected if willing investors were to arise? Amiga Documents: https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/ https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
- asciimo 9y ago
  Here's a direct link to Part 2 on Vimeo, featuring the Warhol story: https://vimeo.com/92583299 https://vimeo.com/92583299
nathell 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638904
hamilyon2 9y ago
So where is my sceptical top hacker news comment saying something negative about theese images?
LocalH 9y ago
I wish they'd just release the raw disk images themselves. It's said Warhol used a prototype Amiga, and thus a prototype version of pre-1.0 Kickstart (earlier than rev 27.5, which is publicly floating around and which has no Workbench).
VectorLock 9y ago
I wonder what the "plan for reading the disks with a cart of exotic gear" actually entailed...
yann-gael 9y ago
This is silly: lots of Amiga computers are still around, the Amiga community knew about these images for years. They didn't do due diligence and studied previous/related/existing works.
- yarrel 9y ago
  The artist who "rediscovered" them is a notorious self-promoter.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  Ahh so I have seen them before. I thought I had.
lerie82 9y ago
this is my favorite part... Warning: include(/nfs/c05/h06/mnt/77459/domains/studioforcreativeinquiry.org/cgi-bin/footer.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/c05/h04/mnt/77459/domains/studioforcreativeinquiry.org/html/wp-content/themes/studio/footer.php on line 47

148 points by ForHackernews 9y ago

I define myself as a former Amiga owner. That computer was so defining and the community so strong sad that Jack Tramiel went out to kill the Amiga with the Atari ST. These Andy Warhol pictures were a claim to fame for many Amiga owners and it was awesome to know that they were found right next to the bouncing red and white ball. It must have taken around 6 or 7 years for the Macintosh and "IBM PC" computers to catch up. The graphic art capacity was head and shoulders about anything else outside of Silicone Graphics. Not to mention that VIM was developed on the Amiga. I had a audio port so I could record through RCA cables and remix things. My church had the Video Toaster which was in use from 1987 to 2004. This actually led to me doing a lot of audio and video work that I still do today. In the future I think the hardware architecture will resemble more of the Amiga as we hit the limits of computer chips. There will be more dedicated chips and cores for more specific things.

ashleyn 9y ago
We've already seen the resurgence of heterogenous computing on the iPhone. The SoC inside offloads video and voice processing to dedicated ASICs. When you call these functions on the API, they run on the ASIC, not on the main CPU.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Video processing has been offloaded in PCs for a long time; the first "3D accelerators" were in the late 90s.
  - ashleyn 9y ago
    Perhaps I meant to say image processing. The ability to point the camera at something and make sense of the picture (FaceID, AR).
  - MisterTea 9y ago
    > the first "3D accelerators" were in the late 90s. You forgot about SGI and I'm sure a few others like Intergraph who were doing dedicated 3D video pipelines in hardware starting in the in the 80's.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      Actually the Amiga had a GPU for 2D graphics. You need a Amiga desktop model and not a A500. The graphics shop down the road had a dozen Amigas with these cards for rendering and even ray tracing. They were pretty amazing. Even Disney used them for Beauty and the Beast and other animation at the time. http://www.amigareport.com/ar216/p1-7.html http://www.amigareport.com/ar216/p1-7.html
      - D_Guidi 9y ago
        really? Pretty sure OCS was the same in all Amigas
- xxs 9y ago
  Back in the 80s there was a co-processor known as 8087 and it was a different beast than 8086/8088. I had a computer with two different CPUs 6502 and Z80 that could actually ran them in parallel. There is nothing new about the ability to have some functionality offloaded to another processing unit regardless of the architecture.
  - MisterTea 9y ago
    The 8087 was the floating point co-processor or FPU for the 8086. It was not a separate CPU.
    - 13of40 9y ago
      The blitter, raster, and audio coprocessors on the Amiga weren't Turing complete general purpose CPUs either.
      - MisterTea 9y ago
        The 8087 FPU was not offloading the CPU as the CPU was halted after the FPU caught a FP instruction and made a DMA call to the CPU and took control of the bus to access what memory it had to. They were a tag-team if you will; jumping in and out of the ring to deal with their respective instructions.
        13of40 9y ago
        I believe Agnus(?) and the CPU had to wait on each other for the memory bus - as evidenced by the CPU getting slower when the screen resolution was increased, due to the greater amount of video memory being read per frame.
        xxs 9y ago
        Halted? You had an option to WAIT for 8087 but you could 'cheat' and just run other instructions, manually calculating cycles. Thus, a system with an 8087 was capable of true parallel processing, performing one operation in the integer ALU of the main CPU while at the same time performing a floating-point operation in the 8087 coprocessor. Since the 8086 or 8088 exclusively controlled the instruction flow and timing and had no direct access to the internal status of the 8087, and because the 8087 could execute only one instruction at a time, programs for the combined 8086/8087 or 8088/8087 system had to ensure that the 8087 had time to complete the last instruction issued to it before it was issued another one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087#Design_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087#Design_and_developm...
megaman22 9y ago
I'm not sure. Heterogeneous architectures were a huge mess with the PS3, for a recent example, and abandoned in the subsequent PS4 for relatively standard x86 kit. Taking advantage of specialized hardware is not without its costs.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  It depends on the API implementation, really. The criticism back in the day was that Cell was difficult to program for. I would imagine this was because its functions were at a lower level, which buys you power at increased development cost. Think the difference between Vulkan and OpenGL. Sony didn't seem to value development value over capability, which led to the PS3 earning the reputation of being an underutilised console: https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on-purpose/ https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on... Apple's heterogenous computing functions on iOS are higher-level and much easier to use. Instead of manually writing code to do FaceID on iOS, possibly involving graduate-degree levels of theory, you simply create a biometry type which abstracts much of the details, many of which developers aren't particularly interested in fine-tuning. This is how someone on a budget like Bank XYZ can use FaceID to unlock your bank app.
  - RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
    Another angle worth considering is the economics of porting titles. If you take full advantage of specialized hardware like the PS3 had, it could have a strong influence on the implementation of games- possibly even pushing down to choices in aesthetics and game mechanics. As a result it may be very difficult to get a comparable experience on another console. If a game is designed and written to more-or-less cater to a common denominator it is more straightforward to later port the game to other consoles or PCs- including platforms that might not exist at the time the original game was created- and mop up sales from those other userbases.
    - Narishma 9y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. It was much easier to develop your game around the PS3's heterogeneous architecture, then port it to a more conventional architecture like the Xbox 360 or PC and get good performance than doing it the other way around.
reaperducer 9y ago
The first college I went to wouldn't let me in as a CompSci major because that program was full. But it had a TV station with an Amiga and Video Toaster that nobody knew how to use, so I was enrolled in the journalism school so I could run it for them.

MrJagil 9y ago

>Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, I wonder what format it was...

ealexhudson 9y ago
They don't really say very much. The Venus bitmap was a demo picture that shipped with Deluxe Paint (and the one they've published seems to be blank where the header/toolbox would be), and although they credited it to Warhol it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in. If these were system disks from a prototype Amiga, then it makes sense that these pictures came from an early version of Deluxe Paint, and that .pic was some intermediate / temporary / memory-dump type format before they adopted the .iff system. Given the Amiga was quite different display-wise, a description of the file format would probably be quite instructive in terms of whether it was an Amiga-native data structure or something already existent somehow.
- vidarh 9y ago
  He used GraphiCraft for the demo, but of course it's possible he at some point later used DPaint. I do believe the reason GraphiCraft is present in the images, though, is because GraphiCraft early on did in fact use pretty much a memory dump. Several of the early graphics programs in fact didn't store a separate full copy of the bitmaps, but let you draw directly into an window on the screen, and relied on AmigaOS to preserve any sections temporarily covered by other windows. But DPaint at least let you paint under the title bar. Later versions of GraphiCraft did use IFF, as Commodore wholly embraced the format once EA released it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- toyg 9y ago
  > it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in. To be fair, that third eye changes the picture in a very significant way, in artistic terms. Art is not about quantity of effort.

whywhywhywhy 9y ago

The Venus image was one of the ones bundled with Deluxe Paint, Just seems he's duplicated the eye. Feels we might be attributing a mistake as a conscious piece of art.

supergreg 9y ago
So it's a remix. What was that about good artists steal?
- vidarh 9y ago
  It's a remix with a single cut and paste.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    This is an artist who signed soup cans. I'm sure he'd tell you something like there is no difference between accident and art when done by an artist.
    - fsloth 9y ago
      This is one way to view artist - not as a craftman, but as a brand like Walt Disney (or Merceded Benz). The artist then functions as a curator for all the data that passes through him and signs those articles he considers worthy of the brand. This is a totally fine way to look at it - just as long as he/she does not tread on someones copyright.
      - toyg 9y ago
        > not as a craftman, but as a brand That's reductionist. Warhol's craft was in recognising and willfully exploiting brand culture. He described the celebrity culture we now live with, and made a job out of being the one who understood how it worked. He wasn't just signing "worthy" stuff; he was showing people how the mechanisms of brand-building and celebrity culture actually work: by repetition and labelling/signing/appropriating. He branded the brands like brands branded the world, and he did it over and over with minor variations, exactly like they do. He was not without his flaws, but he wasn't just some sort of "gatekeeper of cool". He obviously didn't think an artist exists to validate this or that brand; the validation was a side-effect of his artistic craft. This is why trying to "play Warhol" today, using different brands or imagery, is just stupid, in artistic terms: he's done it already, it's all there already and there is nothing else to say on that particular subject.

_pmf_ 9y ago

I sense fraud.

vidoc 9y ago
I'm not sure actually, i have my own doubts but I have to admit the entire absence of artistic talent makes suspect it might actually be legit!
monocasa 9y ago
There's videos of him making it. It was a publicity stunt for Amiga at the time.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

Really crazy. The first one gives off a strong vaporwave vibe. Really weird how that works out.

culot 9y ago
It's 1985, so that's not weird at all.
brandonmenc 9y ago
Art made in 1985 looks like art made today that is made to look like it was made in 1985 - shocking.

mwexler 9y ago

The PDF report gives some fascinating technical detail, linked in the article and at http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_report_v10.pdf http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_repo...

bwldrbst 9y ago

I've got a few Amigas and my 6 year old son loves messing about in Deluxe Paint. Some of his creations are starting to approach Warhol's level... I think...

indescions_2018 9y ago

Part of CMOA's wonderful Invisible Photo doc: http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto Amiga games are so important to the history of game development and design. Could the brand could be resurrected if willing investors were to arise? Amiga Documents: https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/ https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

asciimo 9y ago
Here's a direct link to Part 2 on Vimeo, featuring the Warhol story: https://vimeo.com/92583299 https://vimeo.com/92583299

nathell 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638904

hamilyon2 9y ago

So where is my sceptical top hacker news comment saying something negative about theese images?

LocalH 9y ago

I wish they'd just release the raw disk images themselves. It's said Warhol used a prototype Amiga, and thus a prototype version of pre-1.0 Kickstart (earlier than rev 27.5, which is publicly floating around and which has no Workbench).

VectorLock 9y ago

I wonder what the "plan for reading the disks with a cart of exotic gear" actually entailed...

yann-gael 9y ago

This is silly: lots of Amiga computers are still around, the Amiga community knew about these images for years. They didn't do due diligence and studied previous/related/existing works.

yarrel 9y ago
The artist who "rediscovered" them is a notorious self-promoter.
0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
Ahh so I have seen them before. I thought I had.

lerie82 9y ago

this is my favorite part... Warning: include(/nfs/c05/h06/mnt/77459/domains/studioforcreativeinquiry.org/cgi-bin/footer.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/c05/h04/mnt/77459/domains/studioforcreativeinquiry.org/html/wp-content/themes/studio/footer.php on line 47