Jay Gidwitz

Edited by Hillary Dixler. Music by Synthopolis. Image and motion graphics by Jay Gidwitz.

(Be patient, large file.)



Download Mandala Beta Version 3.

You can see the new facebook online now at http://www.new.facebook.com

It’s really buggy.

Well, this doesn’t surprise me. It’s from the Telegraph newspaper, if you click the image it’ll take you to the site.

I think it’s genuine, and I’ve heard of elephants making art before.

If an elephant can paint a picture, anyone can paint a picture.

And it goes to my theory that we’re are all creative and that it’s just innate.

Everyone should make art!!

About a month ago I submitted to “The TOPTEN Human in the Moment“– an online competition put on by ARTROM gallery based in Rome.

One of my pieces got in!

The Winners’ Exhibition opens Sunday, May 4th at 7:00pm (Rome time) on artromgallery.com.

The picture was an unpublished image from the Erich Zann posters.

Here’s a “google gadget” with my art.

The picture changes every few minutes if the page is reloaded.

It’s more important to be a marketer of what you do than a doer of what you do.

Or I’ve heard it said anyways. But if you make great work and no one is able to find it or ever sees it–then what?

So I try to keep up on marketing occasionally. People know to social network on facebook or facebook (my two facebook pages) or myspace. For artists there is myartspace, deviantart, and for photographers, photo.net.

But now we come to the latest craze in web 2.0: widgets.

Wikipedia says:

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets including: gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake.

I’ve been looking for the best way to make an widget that will work on as many sites as possible, short of outsourcing the project to a computer programmer. If anyone has any ideas pleas contact me.

The best thing I’ve found so far is a quick way to make a google gadget (widget) here. The problem is the photos you can place in the widget are limited to seven in number, and I couldn’t find a way to link back to my web page.

The pluses are the gadget is distributable through google’s directory. Click here to add it to your google page (or just look at it, you can always remove it later.)

My “Dada and Surrealism” professor made the distinction between Surrealists and surrealists. According to him, the people who were deemed to be in the surrealist movement at any given time (by Andre Breton) were surrealists, and the people who weren’t in the movement weren’t surrealists, even if their work was surreal.
I like the professor, but sometimes these academic arguments, are, well academic. (In the pedantic sense of the word.)

Take this for example:

sur-re-al-ism
n.
1. A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.
2. Literature or art produced in this style.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/surrealism)

or

sur-re-al
adj.
1. Having qualities attributed to or associated with surrealism: “Even with most facilities shut down … a few mavericks managed to slip into the park to sample the almost surreal emptiness before the shutdown ended.” Peter H. King.
2. Having an oddly dreamlike quality.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/surreal)

Well, those words seem to mean a style of art, second to the movement, and with good reason.

What else is there to call artwork that have the qualities of a dream?

According to Andre Breton you don’t have to be in the movement to be a surrealist:

Rimbaud is a surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. // Jarry is a surrealist in absinthe.

Andre Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” p 27.

Rimbaud died in 1891 and Jarry died in 1907.

They were both dead before the movement started.