Nathan Shafer. Juried Artist
Constellations
The Cube at QUT Gardens Point
Artist Statement
Wintermoot is an award-winning, multimedia, cyberpunk/superhero universe created by new media artist Nathan Shafer. It is set in an alternate reality Alaska where the three domed cities that were proposed to be built in Alaska in the 19060s and 70s were realized: Arctic City, Seward’s Success, and Denali City. The original comic book series is a twelve-part limited series of interweaving and interconnected stories written in the Alaskan tradition of non-linear storytelling. The domed cities create a uniquely Alaskan science fiction setting to tell a myriad of speculative tales. All Wintermoot comics contain augmented reality features. Wintermoot video games are in development and the first one available to the public will be entitled “When we stop and tell stories while traveling” and will be free to the public, and part of the Anchorage Public Artworks, being located at the Transit Stop of the Anchorage Museum in Summer of 2024.
About the artists
Nathan Shafer is a new media artist from Alaska specializing in augmented reality and digital humanities. He is one of the founding members of both the Meme-Rider Media Team, an art collective founded in 2000 designing early form internet memes, and Manifest.AR, the first international art collective making augmented reality works. He was profiled by PBS Digital Studios as part of an online collaboration called The Future in 2014. He also contributed chapters to the first anthology of AR-based art making, Augmented Reality Art, published by Springer in 2014; followed by chapters in Augmented Reality Games II (2019); Augmented Reality in Education (2020); Augmented Reality in Tourism, Museums and Heritage Sites (2022); and most recently Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality (2023). He received a Creative Capital award in 2020 for his Wintermoot project, a limited series of augmented reality comic books set in an alternate history Alaska. He is a co-founder of the art collective Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas and currently has an exhibition at the Anchorage Museum called Lines of Site: Comic Art and Storytelling in Alaska with fellow Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas artists Dimi Macheras and David Brame.
Credits: Nathan Shafer