Warhol’s Amiga designs were pretty simple. I think some of the ones recovered are just kind of goofing around and walking that line between art and just ephemera. Portraits with flood fills at certain thresholds, just a paint bucket pattern. Cyborg_Warhol is an attempt to make a legitimate computer component that generates the patterns - as I imagine the dangerous combination of man and machine would have need of computer generated patterns constantly in order to output work at a digital pace. I really do find it interesting, also, that William Gibson’s latter two parts of the Sprawl Trilogy deal a lot more with what future artists could be like than the first part: it even offers three different possibilities, and cyborg_warhol is my own fourth contribution. Even though I’m completely aware that this is in no way as technically difficult as recovering or using Amiga graphics software, I think it’s neat that something from that long ago could be recovered circa 2014 and then inspire new work still on into 2020.

Also, for the record, I have Cory Arcangel to thank for recovering the Warhol portrait that inspired this series. This piece streams at 24FPS instead of 60, and there's been several changes to how the code works and what shapes it generates.