Artist Keith Haring Amiga Digital Art Found on Floppy Disk from 1987

[intric8]

itsnicethat.com:

A new Christie’s auction has brought to light five digital artworks Keith Haring created in 1987 on a Commodore Amiga computer. With Pixel Pioneer, Christie’s will sell these artworks as NFTs.

The story of the Amiga used in the creation of this artwork is even more interesting.

The Amiga used to create the artworks was gifted to Haring by his close friend, the psychologist Timothy Leary in the mid-80s – you might know of Leary from his ample work advocating psychedelic drugs. Leary also gave an Amiga to other artists like Andy Warhol, who came up with pixelated artworks depicting subjects like a banana and a big red flower, also minted by Christie’s in 2021.

Personally, this is the first time I had heard that Timothy Leary of LSD fame was responsible for giving Warhol his computer, too.

And the story continues and even includes the likes of Steve Jobs and Sean Lennon in the mix.

In any case, the digital art is going to be sold as NFTs. However, you can gaze and study the works free of charge right here and now. Haring died at the age of 31 in 1990 from HIV/AIDS, three years after this art was produced.

Untitled #1

Untitled #2

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

It's hard to believe the files were all untitled. Come on now, Christies, what were the file names?

[bnilsson]

Hi intric8,

I think these are more interesting than the Andy Warhol Amiga art that got the same treatment a few years ago.

Not a fan of NFTs at all but its good that these things give us the possibility to have these images in a lossless format.

My right clicking skills are quite something , so I followed the NFT obfuscation babushka rabbit and extracted these as 320x200 PNGs. They tried to hide them inside SVGs . Then I converted them to IFF/ILBM images with an optimized palette for easy viewing on a real Amiga.

Download them all from here:

KeithHaring.zip

(30.54 KiB)

Also attached simulations of what I think these look like aspect ratio corrected on a CRT.

[intric8]

This is sensational - thank you for doing this bnilsson!!

[intric8]

I was curious what the original filenames might have been. I see your files are named by the (I assume) creation dates - which is massively cool.

Christies named all of the pieces various forms of "Untitled" which was certainly a common thing for a lot of artwork. But I do very much wonder what Haring named the actual files on his computer. The fact you gleaned the dates, though, is a huge bonus.

[bnilsson]

There are no file names that I could find. The PNG data is encoded inside some base64 (3 layers before I could find the actual PNG data)

I just used the dates from here as filenames

There is some more info here, like how the original Amiga files doesn't exist anymore and they only had a copy from a Mac floppy when someone in the past had converted them to PICT format.

My first hope was to find the PICT files to be able to recover the original pallete with unused colors. But I couldn't find those. Maybe someone with more NFT knowledge could based on the above blog post.

[bnilsson]

Also it's a bit sad that these pictures are displayed in the wrong aspect ratio everywhere.

Like is the case with most classic era 320x200 NTSC Amiga art. The people who wrote the above blog post does not seem to be aware that they are supposed to be stretched vertically to appear as they did on Keiths monitor when he painted them.

[intric8]

You are absolutely right, bnilsson. This is a problem all over the internet. It is one I personally avoid by either stretching things in a very particular way in photoshop (hard edges) and using an aspect ratio calculator, or actually photographing my CRT screen, which can dilute the vibrance of the colors but the true aspect ratio is more important in my opinion. I've actually bought specific iPhone apps to help me photograph my flickering CRTs just to try and make things as accurate as possible without too much distortion.

I spent a considerable amount of time writing about this problem ... seven years ago! Holy smoke time goes by fast. I even took a bunch of Jim Sachs' artwork and stretched it myself to show how dramatically different it looked on a CRT with tall pixels, compared to what is often shown on YouTube and blogs today. It's horrifying how pervasive the problem is.

Big props to you for noticing and caring to show things correctly.

[mikeboss]

oh wow, thank you @bnilsson for extracting/creating the IFF/ILBM images! I tried to contact the people involved with this project via Twitter/X but sadly absolutely no one seems to care about the wrong aspect ratio

https://twitter.com/mibosshard/status/1 ... 4824559678

https://twitter.com/mibosshard/status/1 ... 6091098299

cheers,
michael

[bnilsson]

How did the iPhone photos turn out of your CRT, did you post any samples of these?

Photographing CRT screens in an optimal way is an interesting thing technically. Why aren't photo nerds more into this, or are they?

I used an FS-UAE CRT shader and some specific settings to capture the approximate aspect. The nice thing about the shader is that it decouples your screens actual resolution and aspect (in my case 2560x1440). And the pixel art look more like in its natural state. There is no 100% correct aspect I don't think since on the CRT you can just the width and height separate.

[mikeboss]

USD 1'587'600.00 !!! crazy, for five files with pixelart

https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/keit ... /lots/3479