Researchers have discovered 28 previously unknown artworks by American pop artist Andy Warhol on ageing floppy disks from 1985.
The digital images were "trapped" for nearly 30 years on Amiga floppy disks stored in the archives collection of The Andy Warhol Museum (AWM).
The images depict some of Warhol's best-known subjects including Campbell's soup cans, Botticelli's Venus, self-portraits and Marilyn Monroe.
The impetus for the investigation came when New York-based artist Cory Arcangel learned about Warhol's Amiga experiments from a 1985 Commodore infomercial on YouTube.
Arcangel approached the AWM in December 2011 regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum's possession, and catalouging any files on its associated diskettes.
In April 2012, Arcangel contacted Golan Levin, a Carnegie Mellon University art professor and director of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (FRSCI), a laboratory that supports "atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional" arts research.
Levin connected Arcangel with the CMU Computer Club, a student organisation that had gained renown for its expertise in "retrocomputing" or the restoration of vintage computers.
CMU Computer Club members determined that even reading the data from the diskettes entailed significant risk to the contents, and would require unusual tools and methodologies.
By February 2013, the club had completed a plan for handling the delicate disk media, and gathered at the AWM to see if any data could be extracted.
It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol's imagery existed on the floppy disks - nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data.
Reviewing the disks' directory listings, the team's initial excitement on seeing promising file names like "campbells.Pic" and "marilyn1.Pic" quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognised by any utility.
Soon afterward, however, the club's forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol's style by the AWM's experts.
At least 11 of these images featured Warhol's signature.
"What's amazing is that by looking at these images, we can see how quickly Warhol seemed to intuit the essence of what it meant to express oneself, in what then was a brand-new medium: the digital," Arcangel said.
Warhol was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. He died in 1987, aged 58.
