Tedium - The Artist and the Amiga 🎨

Today in Tedium: If there’s any famed artist who would likely “get” the power of generative AI for creatives right from the jump, it’s likely Andy Warhol. The pop artist’s work represented a powerful example of remix culture in action, and it was from that basic starting point that he developed an entire visual language that came to encompass music, movies, even an entire cultural scene. Sure, the soup cans and screen-printed drawings offered a great starting point. But they proved to shape an entire world of creativity whose influence went far beyond any individual screen print or artistic image. Which perhaps explains what he saw in the Commodore Amiga. The computer, a famously ahead-of-its-time device with a feature set that seemed destined to attract visual artists along with traditional gamers, utilized the interest of Warhol and another New York counterculture icon, Blondie singer Deborah Harry, to help promote this new tool to computer users around the world. And just like the way generative AI is encouraging some artists to extend their skill set today, when Warhol saw a computer that threatened to make his art style trivial to replicate, he didn’t turn away. Today’s Tedium considers the broader lessons from Andy Warhol’s Amiga embrace. — Ernie @ Tedium

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Warhol was the subject of a long-form interview about digital creativity for Amiga World magazine. Warhol rarely did interviews at the time.

What Andy Warhol, famous creative person, saw in the Amiga

Warhol could have left the Amiga on that stage, and nobody might have gotten upset with him about it. We were still in the early days of affinity-driven marketing. The first Air Jordan, for example, appeared in stores just three months prior. Presumably, whether in Amigas or in Commodore-endorsed checks, Andy Warhol likely got paid.

And sure, maybe affinity had something to do with Warhol appearing on the cover of Amiga World magazine the next year, in that magazine’s third issue. (That he appeared at all is perhaps a surprise; in the piece, according to an editor of Interview magazine—a publication Warhol founded, no less—Andy doesn’t do interviews.)

But it becomes clear that Warhol is champing at the bit to use the new technology.

In his discussion with Amiga World’s Guy Wright and Glenn Suokko, Warhol highlighted a few important points about how he sees creativity:

Creative Possibilities

At the time of the interview, the Xerox had gained a deep influence on the high-art world, as it helped to make it possible to make ambitious new kinds of mixed-media artwork that weren’t previously possible.

The Amiga seemed to be able to take things even further, though one challenge Warhol faced was that he couldn’t get a hold of an Amiga-compatible printer to actually put his images on a sheet of paper—not even a normal-sized one, let alone one that would let him produce prints.

Nonetheless, he was way ahead of his peers. He said that other artists of the era—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, who he name-dropped twice in the interview—were embracing the opportunities that new technology had to offer. Many had already shown a deep interest in using technology like the Amiga—including Interview staff members—but Warhol was in an unusual position, in that he was one of the few people to have access to the tool.

Warhol saw a high potential that tools like the Amiga would open up to new kinds of creators, including amateurs. Though, at the time, it was still a pretty exclusive device.

“Well, I’ve been telling everybody about the machine, but they haven’t been able to get one yet,” he said.

Compare this to the early months around generative AI, where people seemed to be wanting to cut to the front of the line to access MidJourney or ChatGPT. Generative AI has become a status symbol, with the buzz behind it at first reflecting a similar sort of exclusivity.

Creative Compatibility

When Warhol painted that picture of Debbie Harry, one of the things that seemed to come through in that display was that Warhol’s style translated particularly well to the format. At the time of the interview, Warhol admitted that this creative compatibility made it easy for him to latch onto the Amiga’s capabilities.

“The thing that I like most about doing this kind of art on the Amiga is that it looks like my work,” he was quoted as saying.

During the interview, he was working to put the finishing touches on a set of Dolly Parton prints. When speculating on his use case for the Amiga, he talked of moving the device to his studio, where he would be able to simplifying his production process, especially for prints.

“It’ll be really great, and if we can get a printer, I’ll do this portrait in four different colors and send them out to Dolly,” he added.

Given that much of his art was process-driven, perhaps it makes sense that he found some value in making that process easier.

Creative Integrity

One question that drives much discussion in the generative AI realm is the idea of whether new, simplifying technology devalues the work of creators.

This was a question that was also around in the 1980s and 1990s, when digitized art in general was first emerging. Would making art with a computer make things too trivial—or worse, threaten the copyright of talented people?

It was not an isolated fear, and one that large companies made a point to argue.

“Your works can be uploaded into massive networks accessible by millions of people,” said Louise Dembeck, a Time Warner vice president, according to a 1994 Associated Press article. “If you don’t know who’s getting it and who’s printing it off the screen, it’s just there for the taking.”

Warhol was asked about this very issue, but pointed out that many prints are actually supposed to be exact replicas. He did not seem concerned about copying. “Well, you can stop at whatever you want,” he said. “Etchings usually stop at a certain number.”

But what about the idea that a machine could so easily mimic his style? When posed this question, he pointed out that other artists had gotten their hands on the Amiga and had taken it in different directions.

“It looks like the work that I started doing,” he said, making it clear that where he started is different from where they would end up. “I still think that someone like a decorator could use it when he wants to show somebody how their apartment would look like all in blue or all in white, or … they could just do it so easily. Change a chair or a color.”

Warhol’s thinking on this issue ultimately turned out to be true. Millions of artists use graphical tools of all sorts, but there’s still plenty of room for unique voices to emerge.