After bracing myself against wind and sand, I see the massive, hulking shell of a building. Its white walls are crumbling, its great glass windows long broken. Perched right on the shoreline, the only way to enter the abandoned South Fremantle Power Station is through empty coastline and a hole in the fence, ignoring signs warning against trespassing. The power station, located in isolation outside of Fremantle, Western Australia, started producing electricity from coal [...]
Merrill Garbus is a lovely example of the power of one + friends. She decided to pursue her solo musical project without a record studio. Without specialized equipment and without a formal band. Armed with a versatile voice and a ukulele she created tUnE yArDs, a sonorous experiment that make us question the need for intermediaries in the long and expensive chain of musical production -don’t you worry music whales, were not planning any riots against “the system here” – don’t send [...]
If there is one typographer you should keep an eye on, that is without a doubt Alejandro Paul. A quick look at his twitter just tells us everything: “Facebook says Thank You to 500 million users with a Sudtipos typeface“, “Elizabeth Arden and Burgues Script“, “Nabisco + Amorinda font” and the list keeps going. From small projects to government-size corporations, everybody is in love with Paul’s work and is not hard to understand why. From simple sans-serifs to [...]
Gopher Staffer and licenced biologist Angie Nicolás has some sleep issues. From her wonderful, sleep deprived but still scientific mind, we were able to convince her to write about a topic that had been personally bothering her: birds that go chirp in the night. While Ms. Nicolás might annihilate us for writing an intro to her piece (we’re sneaky like that!) we feel proper introduction is warranted, because we too are plagued with that admirable bug, curiosity. [...]
It was a rainy summer afternoon when I discovered her in the attic above my mother’s bedroom, hidden beneath a thick layer of dust and surrounded by a fortress of boxes and spider webs. She was an old Minolta, and with her I started practicing the very basic skills that I could teach myself from the library’s old-fashioned manuals or by imitating the photographers with big cameras on the main boulevard. Before long I found myself snapping all sorts of things around me: the zigzagging [...]
Brooklyn-born global dweller Romeo Alaeff is an artist. Any sort of definition beyond that may be fuzzy or inaccurate, and his work itself blurs the boundaries between icon and art, funny and serious, traditional and experimental, and public and private. His explorations have taken some wild turns: Alaeff studied biomedical engineering before graduating as a photographer, going to graduate school for Fine Arts, detouring somewhere along the line to work as an animation editor and writer for children’s shows like [...]
Dear friends,
As many of you know by now, this Friday at 8:35am the first print edition of the Gopher Illustrated was born! we promise a much lengthier feature in the near future, but for the moment, witness in all its 90’s-style glory this animated gif which documents the first minutes of our very first encounter with our very first issue!
It weighed 0.98 pounds and smelled of pure ink and paper glory! Congratulations to all those mothers and fathers who made this possible! [...]
Posting about climate change and a green conscience may strike some as preachy, and we at the Gopher have to confess a great deal of pickiness when it comes to reading up on it. Ruining the environment is bad, and being a composting expert will earn you friends in certain circles (be our friend! come oooonnnn). We, too, watched the Al Gore film and felt that gagging sensation through Food Inc, ok?! And as much as we enjoy some people’s hysterics, sandwich boards and [...]
People, papers and Julia herself tell us that Julia Haltigan’s musical family, a hundred-piece band that includes a singing-quartet alum grandmother and a father talented in the guitar-arts inspired her pursuit of music. Not having been fortunate enough to witness family reunions, we will say this: Julia Haltigan’s music is all leather boots, smoky rooms and whimsy in a way that makes us want to burn our bras while wearing pretty lace and red lipstick; confusing, wonderful, inspiring and astoundingly infectious. Gopher [...]
Writer and filmmaker Julio Ramirez is not just a friend but also an inspiration, genuinely. I first had the pleasure of meeting Julio in the summer of ’07, during an intense three-week screenwriting program (or soul searching session) at TheFilmSchool in Seattle. We were among only five students in the class under the age of 35, and Julio and I instantly bonded and developed a respect for each other’s worldview. A Colombian native, Julio has traversed the US and basically [...]
La Roue Sans Fin (2009)
Simon Bernheim is a French artist whose work “constantly evolves around the perception of words, signs and language. His project is to change the meaning of words and language away from its sense and towards its form.” (more here) We got in touch with him through the much beloved Estelle Hanania, and could not resist putting some of his work up. Bernheim has taken part in exhibitions and wall paintings in South Korea, [...]
Lido Pimienta is a mother, an artist, a singer-songwriter, a screamer, a banana-sandwich eater, a student, a Colombian in Canada, a Canadian with dreams of Colombia. She also has one of the best names we can think of. So we did what we do best, emailed her all starry-eyed and asked her questions about her life, her music and her plans and her views. This one is a real mixed media portrait, all images songs and text are of the artist’s [...]
Freddie Stevenson, the English-born singer-songwriter is a self-taught musical genius. Freddie gives his listeners the kind of musical and lyrical experience usually reserved for the likes of Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. When he told us he loved The Gopher we, quite understandably, nearly fainted from jubilation. Following our celebration [which may or may not have included unstoppable underwear-dancing], and several e-mail exchanges analysing Creed’s “My Own Prison” later, we bring you a story written especially for Gopher-fanatics where he gives us [...]
Full disclosure here: We love Kickstarter. Through their website we’ve been fundraising to print the first, fabulous, tricked-out print issue of The Gopher Illustrated. We got in touch with the Kickstarter team, and they were like “Ummm. sure, why not!” so we got excited and coordinated an international phone call through internet phone jacks and a recording device stuck to the earpiece and a pencil and paper in case the recording device didn’t record. The site’s co-founder, Yancey Strickler, picked up the phone [...]
When the Candy Claws told us they wanted to visit The Gopher on their Online World Tour, we were excited to learn what an online tour was. We asked them hopefully “does this mean the band plays live on our website? ” and they were like no you simple gopher dontcha know anything at all?” and we were like “well then what is it?” and they were like “we make a new exclusive video featuring one of our songs for each destination [...]
Philippe Intraligi is a German-born, Brazil-interning, New York-dwelling, Graphic Designer whose impressive client includes Telecom Italia, Adidas (and their Missy Elliott collection that a Gopher Editor who will remain nameless loves) and whose branding work is rooted in aesthetic philosophy and love of Bauhaus. He also just confessed to us that even though he’s a branding rockstar (our judgment, but clearly!) we have the privilege of getting his first interview, where he talks design, TV and even sends us songs he listens to [...]
Born in Fribourg and designer from the cradle, Bénédict M. Rohrer [ a.k.a. Billy Ben ] is much more than your average line-drawing, typeface-choosing feller. To this team of Gophers, he’s a character that pops up regularly when we are on the lookout for music: Records, flyers, concert posters, dj booths and booklets recurrently carry his name on their backs, tempting us -free wheelin’ e-mailers- to contact him. This temptation proved too strong and we just went for it with B. It took twelve [...]
With all these music and art and design posts, we couldn’t resist waxing philosophical. On a recent trip, I met with philosophy Professor Jesse Prinz at NYC’s Deitch Galleries and was so excited about this interview I forgot my wallet. (Thanks for coffee, Jesse!). There, he talked about art history, the similarity between moral judgment and aesthetic judgment and why porcelain cats can be political. Jesse is a Professor of Philosophy at C.U.N.Y, former Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at [...]
This one time I went Scuba Diving. I was thirteen, and and I felt like an idiot with all the gear and the flippers and the mask on top of the awkwardness of being thirteen. That is, until I got in the water and floated and there was silence and tons of little, shiny fish were swimming around me and I never wanted to leave. Listening to the Candy Claws is like going in the water was that one time. Ryan and Kay [...]
Receiving and reading submissions is probably one of my most favoritest things to do. Usually, I put them in a neat little reading stack (on my e-mail inbox, of course) and go through them one by one, in order of arrival. Except, that is, in the case of Stephen Ledwidge, whose email shot out right at me as I was about to close my browser. It would be too easy to say it was Irish luck, but I thought “eh, why not.” Along [...]
In this enormous world few galleries-cum-shops are loved by the Gopher team as much as El Diente de Oro. The “Diente” is a beautimous project located in Buenos Aires and founded by our longtime friend PIAN, along with musician Coni Cibilis. It is a shop, a gallery, an engine for all sorts of cultural activities and for many a traveller, a place to feel comfortable: it has one chair, one small sofa, one door and one bathroom [ though the bathroom [...]
Shane Lavalette is a Photographer. He lives in Massachussets, shoots everywhere else, often waking at the ugly, hairy and sleepy side of dawn to capture space in convoluted places (this makes him a hero in our lazy eyes. I mean… lazy selves eyes… um…) and tells us the Ninja Turtles camera was his first piece of photographic equipment. He is also the young and gifted editor of the art-photography magazine “Lay Flat.” The magazine includes loose photo prints in [...]
Kyra Choucroun is one of the founders of The Gopher Illustrated and a political fiend (try and stop her, we dare you!) Her interests range from International Political Economy to Development and Conflict resolution. Fresh out of a Masters from the London School of Economics, K-fresh is hard at work at an internship in the UK. A native of Venezuela and a dweller of everywhere else, Kyra has spent most of her life explaining away the intricacies and misunderstandings of international politics to… well… everyone. [...]
Gentle Friendly begins as an environmental experiment in instrumental hodgepodge. After a friend rescues a drum-kit and some coffee from “a skip” David and Daniel [ and their drum-kit, their coffee, their friend and two old keyboards ] get together and start making enough noise to make the neighbors complain. Though their baptismal attic is no longer a viable venue, the London duo still makes noise-pop that is everything but neat. Sounds accumulate, loop and come back to bite you in the ass, [...]
The world is ending, and every page of every magazine ever printed has self-destructed – burned, BURNED! – in protest of the coming apocalypse of the newsstand because by golly the printed page is a dinosaur waiting to breathe its last breath and die in the thirsty, muddy pits of Fantasia-evocation and early childhood horror. This is, at least, what some would have us believe and what we Gophers might have started preaching (if only out of fear of the rapidly wagging index finger) if [...]
As August comes to an end, we bring you an artist from beyond the turning leaves of Europe and America. Guy Yanai is a Middle eastern painter, the founder of the well-known project Gallery 33. Our sources reveal that Guy is also a better-than-average tennis player and Campari lover. For you, gentle readers, Guy and a couple of hours of Friday left, enjoy both. Read though.
[ click on the title for full interview ]
- What lessons have you learned from working in design and within the art scene of Minneapolis?
1. I don’t really see myself as a designer.
2. People here really stick to themselves. It is a very Dutch/German town.
3. Minneapolis invented the modern form of advertising.
4. Minneapolis designers are obsessed with the “kitch retro” visual work. I still don’t know why.
[ click on the title for full interview ]
Friend and Gopher-writer Dylan Shrader came up with an idea for a review format. Early on, us Gophers agreed that we’d like musicians to do all the music reviews. Shrader is a musician, so he qualifies for this, but he may have just convinced us that personal experiences with music can be effective introductions to music. Read through and let us know what you think. Check out Dan Auerbach’s music here.
Lope, our Art Director, is a type freak. Longtime editor of Platanoverde Magazine in Venezuela, he dreams in highly stylized type-text and drools at the sight of Futura. When curating portfolios for our first edition, our dear Lope almost seized with delight. The reason? Jessica Hische.
Jessica graciously provided enough images to fill two portfolios and answered our many many questions. We were going to make you wait for the print edition for all the goodies we have in store but what the [...]
We have been hard at work putting together our zero issue (which you will be able to flip through in our nifty PageFlip on our “magazine” section) several issues have come up surrounding the idea of spaces. Spaces as in “we’re running out of space” due to our growing collection of tchatchkes. Or spaces as in the fascinating world of digital real-estate. Or time-spaces, since the editors of this fine magazine are in different time zones – making phone calls is fabulously chaotic. However this [...]
Much ado about style, a crash course on css and we’re on the interwebs! This page is very much under construction, so fret not faithful friend – it will be all it should be on the double. In the meantime, if you would like to expedite the process to this facelift, don’t be shy. We like to learn.
And if you want to help just moderately… click on this post and comment with the answer to this question: when you click on a post, can you [...]
After a weekend – and lets face it, more than one skipped workday – we are done shooting the photos for the upcoming presentation of the magazine. Oh yes, the Gopher Illustrated [upon Lope's request i feel obligated to say that the name was born on May 17th, after far too much deliberation] is up and running. To show appreciation to my mother, who is surely the only human reading this, a picture for your viewing pleasure:
There will be a video up by this weekend. [...]
In the audiovisual era of today, it is definitely not new to experience music both through eyes and ears alike. Concerts and musical presentations have become a mix of visual and auditive stimuli running through entire crowds around the globe. In fact, to some extent it has become the norm for the musical component to be paired up with its siamese sibling -the visual addition- in order to achieve success on stage. The SZ is a French musical duo (Franck and Damien) that has [...]
While the expression “art that haunts you” is applicable to plenty of artists, we must admit that when the imagery of the artist is built on skulls, decaying corpses and the re-visiting of deities, well, the results tend to get much more ghoulish. Louie Cordero [ Manila, 1978 ] is a painter, sculptor and illustrator [and not a musician, though there is a Puerto Rican musician with the same name - we're verry sorry Louie!] who reinterprets contemporary pop [...]
