I am Nathan Shafer and this website is an archive of a project called Robokonon & the Cosmic Co-Ed. It began as a personal website where I had posted some artwork and writing, but the traffic data was more interesting than the work, so I decided to take the search phrases and keywords and use them to make the kind of stuff people were hopefully looking for. Spoiler alert: they were not. But nevertheless, 'Robokonon' and 'cosmic coed' were two of my favorite search words, which together made a cool sounding title for this site, it was all done with the old Yahoo! Site-Builder stuff, which looks dated now, but I am convinced will look cool again.

This index page (landing page) is from 2007, back when I was a very young Alaskan meme-lord living in New Jersey and building websites for a horror movie company in Long Island City Queens. Back then, memes were called 'image macros' and they were not the same memes we all know and love today. In 2008, I lost a bet with a sorceror, and was exiled back home to Anchorage, cursed to forever make AR projects in places without wireless fidelity. And it was here in Anchorage that I continued to train, perfecting my memes, in the solitude and quiet that only the northen world can provide.

If you are looking for something a little more recent to sink your teeth into, in more or less chronological order, here is some recent stuff I have done, or am currently doing:

WINTERMOOT -- an augmented reality comic book written, created and conceived of in collaboration with several other Alaskans.

DIRIGIBLES OF DENALI -- AR recreations of the 3 domed cities proposed in Alaska during the 1970s, with a collection of Alaskan science fiction by Alaskan authors set in those very same domed cities.

ANCHORAGE NARRATIVES -- done in collaboration with the Anchorage Centennial in 2015, four Alaskan authors write historical fiction in four different time periods in Anchorage's brief, but storied existence.

EXIT GLACIER -- AR recreations of five of the former termini at Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park, outside Seward, AK.

I was a member of the Meme-Rider Media Team and the Manifest.AR collectives; and am currently a member of N-Collective/Shared Universe, dedicated to creating new genre work in Alaska. It was formed in collaboration with CIRI Foundation (an Alaska Native corporation in Southcentral Alaska) and the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska.

To see some of my recent projects and collaborations, or works by the other Meme-Riders, click HERE.

If you are here because one of my AR projects is no longer working, and you want to know why, it is either because 1) all things are temporary, 2) I am toying with the notion of being scared of change, or 3) because I have not updated it yet.

Also, there are almost no reliable or good third party AR platforms right now that I am using, so we are retooling everything into a new format, that will last for a couple of years at least. Maybe.