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Nathan Shafer

Nathan Shafer (born 1979) is an American new media artist, author and illustrator based in Anchorage, Alaska.  He was an early practitioner of augmented reality, digital humanities, and internet memes.  He co-founded the Meme-Rider Media Team in 2001, was a member of the international Manifest.AR art group (2010-2015), and founded the Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas comic book shared universe in 2020.  

In 2014, Shafer was profiled by PBS Digital Studios and Alaska Public Media group Indie Alaska as part of a series called “The Future” in a mini documentary entitled “I am an Augmented Reality Creator”.

Shafer has contributed chapters to the Springer Series on Cultural Computing focused on the history of augmented reality art: Augmented Reality Art (2014), Augmented Reality Videogames II (2018), Augmented in Education (2020), Augmented Reality in Tourism, Museums, and Heritage Sites (2022), and Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence (2023).

In 2020, Shafer was among the recipients of the Creative Capital Award for his comic book series Wintermoot.

Personal life:

As a kid, his family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he currently resides. Shafer graduated from Bartlett High School in Anchorage, in 1996. He received a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida in 2005 and a Masters in new media from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2008.  Shafer is currently a special education teacher in the Anchorage School District who teaches autistic kids. Shafer is married to fellow artist Joelle Howald, who Shafer often collaborates with.

Artistic Practice:

Shafer’s artistic practice encompasses several different formats: illustration, writing, storytelling, videogames, augmented reality, virtual reality and others.  As a writer, Shafer has published non-fiction, specifically about new media art and Alaskan history, as well as fiction, usually genre fiction such as science fiction.

As an illustrator, Shafer has illustrated his own graphic novel series Wintermoot.  As a new media artist, he has pioneered or been an early practitioner of several new art forms: internet memes, augmented reality, digital humanities, and electronic literature. Shafer’s work is also highly connected to ‘socially engaged’ artistic practices.

In 2020, Shafer cofounded a group of Alaskan comic book makers under the named Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas (also known as Fish Head Soup Comics).  Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas comic book titles are in a shared speculative fiction universe.  In 2023, the Anchorage Museum hosted a survey show of three of the Fish Head Soup artists including Shafer, called “Lines of Sight: Comic Art and Storytelling in Alaska”.

Shafer’s style of making comic books, videogames and augmented reality projects in Alaska is heavily inspired by literary punk and is sometimes referred to as ‘cryopunk’ or ‘Denaliwood’.

Notable Works:

Exit Glacier (2012) – Shafer built an augmented reality project at Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park.  The augmented reality showed the glacier termini from five different points in history on location.

Anchorage Narratives (2015) – Shafer was commissioned by the City of Anchorage to make an augmented reality literature project as part of their Centennial Celebration. The project included four stories from the history of Anchorage written by four different Alaskan authors, that Shafer illustrated and augmented.  The stories were published in Forum Magazine run by the Alaska Humanities Forum.

Dirigibles of Denali (2018) – In 2018, Shafer presented a show at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska about three ‘domed cities’ that were proposed to be built in Alaska but were never realized: Seward’s Success, Arctic City, and Denali City.

Wintermoot (2020-present) – Wintermoot is a twelve-part limited comic book series set in an alternate reality Alaska, where the domed cities had been completed.

Goodnight Naruto Runners (2023) – an illustrated bedtime story book based on the Storming Area 51 memes and the Goodnight Moon children’s book, set in the Wintermoot Shared Universe.

When we stop and tell stories while traveling (2024) – a public art piece commissioned by the Anchorage 1% for the Arts. It is an augmented reality music-based videogame where players have a rap battle as ravens or magpies while waiting for their bus to arrive.

Scholarly Articles on Augmented Reality in the Springer Series on Cultural Computing by Nathan Shafer:

Augmenting wilderness: points of interest in pre-connected worlds

Circumpolar Gamifications in the Age of Global Warming: Ice Levels, Anxiety and the Anthropocene

Alaskan Timeosaurs and Interplanetary Human Spaghetti: A Regional Look at Augmented Reality in Special Classrooms

The Transhuman Docent: Persistent Human Interaction in Digital Heritage Sites

Augmenting Artificial Intelligences in Fiction: Evolving from Primordial Internet Memes to Cybergods of Disruption

The aesthetics of liminality: augmentation as an art form

Reimagining Places, Reconstructing Histories: Augmented Reality Art and Heritage Apps as an Ultimate Display

How Creative Writers can work with Archivists: A Crash Course in Cooperation and Perspectives