New Media Artist // Anchorage
This lecture has been postponed, and will be rescheduled to a later date. You can read the announcement.
Nathan Shafer is a new media artist 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. Shafer’s geobased AR works have been displayed on every continent.
His work has been shown at Noxious Sector Projects, Unseen Sculptures, Bunnell Street Arts Center, Rhizome, ISEA, Pratt Museum, Virtuale Switzerland, Out North Contemporary Art House and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. He also contributed chapters to the first anthology of AR-based art making, Augmented Reality Art, published by Springer in 2014; Augmented Reality Games II, published in 2019; and Augmented Reality in Education, forthcoming in 2020. 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.
Nathan responds to Revised Utopias by taking a look at his augmented reality project Dirigibles of Denali. This work looks at how three futuristic cities in Alaska never panned out, and how they are now reconsidered. The 20th Century saw several iterations of utopian living in the form of domed cities. In the 1970s, Alaska saw three proposals for domed cities, which were ultimately unrealized: Arctic City, Seward’s Success and Denali City. Originally Alaska’s domed cities were seen as ways of mastering the harsh Alaskan environment, but in a contemporary context, the notion of domed cities in the age of global warming are less colonial endeavors, and are now viable methodologies of both surviving climate change and preserving the disappearing natural world.
