Andy Warhol's Amiga art confirms him as a true hero for our digital age

Tech detective work on some old computer disks has restored work by the artist who was our greatest visual prophet

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Andy2, 1985, a self-portrait created by Andy Warhol and recently retrieved from an Amiga computer floppy disk. Photograph: Reuters

It had to happen. Andy Warhol's experiments in digital art have been rediscovered. Of course they have – how could the most prophetic artist of the 20th century have missed out on the birth struggles of the 21st?

Warhol wrote the blueprint for our time. He knew that everyone was going to be famous for 15 minutes and that, as a consequence, fame would melt into banality. He could see that art would become as easy to make as taking a Polaroid, that portraiture would give way to the democracy of the selfie – as he demonstrated in photo-booth portraitstaken as early as the 1960s.

Now it turns out that Warhol was even more prophetic than we thought. He was one of the first artists ever to experiment with computer software.

Thanks to the curiosity of Cory Arcangel – one of today's most important artists working with digital technologies – a forgotten hoard of Warhol artworks has been rescued from old Amiga disks by students who ingeniously hacked into the defunct software.

The works Warhol created to commission in 1985 to help launch the Amiga 1000 computer are not earth-shattering in themselves. He essentially recreated some of his paintings as digital images.

Reading on mobile? Watch Warhol painting a portrait of Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer

But the meeting of Andy Warhol and a computer at the dawn of the digital age is hugely suggestive. Warhol, after all, is the man who flirted with being a machine. He wore a metallic silver wig and made paintings on a production line, with assistants silkscreening found photographs onto canvas.

This computer-like style was eerie. Yet it was not the real him. In reality, Andy Warhol was a talented draughtsman, a secret Catholic and a compassionate historian of his times. He pretended to be a machine because that was the best way he found to capture the way the world was changing. From canned soup to instant pictures, Warhol took the pulse of the age as America became a society of consumers and celebrity watchers. He portrayed reality so truly he seemed to invent it – as if one artist could create the celebrity age.

Warhol was a reporter who simply told the truth. Such truth-telling is an act of love. "I'll be your mirror," as Warhol's protege Lou Reed wrote in the Velvet Underground's tenderest song. Reflecting what you are is not cold, it is passionate. Warhol acted like a machine, but he was all heart.

This makes him a true hero for the digital age. Are we all becoming machines? If so, Andy Warhol is the artist who saw it coming – and who even made computer art, as the lost and found Amiga files reveal. Yet he is also our guide, showing us how to maintain our humanity under the metal wig, how to preserve the ghost in the machine.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/apr/25/warhol-amiga-disc-art-rediscovered