I ONCE HAD the pleasure of hearing a historically informed performance of a Bach sonata played on an organ made by master builder John Brombaugh. Brombaugh organs are tuned in what is called unequal temperament. It is a bizarrely little-known fact, but today’s tuning standard, equal temperament, is a relatively modern system. To hear Glenn Gould plunk away at Bach on a piano is a historical goof. Today, if confronted with Gould performing his music on a contemporary instrument, Bach would most likely wonder, “Why is this Canadian guy playing my compositions out of tune?” Like computer software, music is a set of instructions performed in real time on various instruments, and like all technologies, parts of these systems can become obsolete—even something as common as what we hear as C major. Moreover, technology—like taste—does not necessarily proceed in a straight line. If we traveled back to the 1700s and heard Bach play, we might just as easily ask, “Why is he playing his own stuff out of tune?” Hierarchies of authenticity might be best considered relative.
A historically informed setting for the images discovered by this preservation effort would dictate that the following real-time systems be strung together: Warhol’s images would be need to be visualized in real time and in real space by a period- specific, analog, cathode-ray-tube Amiga monitor hooked up to an Amiga 1000 running the specific version of GraphiCraft found on Warhol’s disk, booted using Amiga Kickstart 26.7, all running on US 110V, 60Hz power. This is the only performance of these sketches that would be 100 percent accurate to 1985. The images you see reproduced here are renderings of the raw digital files for contemporary print and Web—a Gould version, if you will. Luckily, though, we might be on the right track, because the performance of these images is not entirely limited to a given medium, technology, or period, any more than an image can exist as a true original, as Warhol knew better than anyone. In 1986, when asked how he would like to see his sketches displayed, Warhol replied, “Well, we could get a printout. I could just print this out if we had the printer.” I hope he would have been OK with making a few thousand copies.
via the warhol files: andy warhol’s long-lost computer graphics – artforum.com / in print