Nathan Shafer with Mengloth Entertainment Head Touches Place: The Black Pyramid, 2025
Augmented Reality Videogame, User’s Manual, Comic Books, Digital Prints, Wood, Plastic, Fiberglass, Paint, Vinyl
Variable dimensions, AR pyramid: 550 ft, IRL pyramid 4 ft
Head Touches Place: the Black Pyramid is an augmented reality videogame produced by Nathan Shafer with Mengloth Entertainment. It is presented using web-based augmented reality viewers can launch on their own devices (you don’t need an app to play)! The lore of the videogame is interconnected with Shafer’s Wintermoot comic book series, featuring such exciting content as a subterranean pyramid, fanny packs, Hyperborean Ravens, astral projection, and a gather quest to fashion necropants from a half-sasquatch superhero’s leg skin.
The following story is real: in the 1970s, several ‘psychic warriors’ working for the top-secret Project Stargate program were given coordinates to a black site. They astral projected to the coordinates and remote viewed a gigantic black pyramid built by ancient aliens under a mountain in Alaska. The pyramid they viewed was being used to generate a mysterious projection of some sort AND the aliens were currently working in collaboration with the US military to do it! To this day, the coordinates in Alaska where the alleged Black Pyramid is said to exist remain a no-fly zone riddled with electromagnetic anomalies and continue to be mysteriously absent from USGS maps of interior Alaska.
The augmented reality experience includes a life-size replica of the black pyramid as it was described by the psychic warriors of Project Stargate and the areas at all four corners of the pyramid compromise the first level of Known Ravenspace, a new videogame from Nathan Shafer and Mengloth Entertainment coming in 2028!
Artist Bio
Nathan Shafer (born 1979) is a new media artist, author and illustrator based in Anchorage, Alaska. He was an early practitioner of augmented reality, digital humanities, and internet memes. He cofounded the Meme-Rider Media Team in 2001, was a member of the international Manifest.AR art group (2010-2015), founded the Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas comic book shared universe in 2020 and Mengloth Entertainment XR/Videogame Group in 2024. In 2020, Shafer received a Creative Capital Award for his comic book series Wintermoot, which is part of his larger series all set in a shared universe of alternate reality stories called the Denaliwood Arcade.
Mengloth Entertainment is an XR/Videogame group using lore from Nathan Shafer’s Denaliwood Arcade shared universe to create interactive experiences and videogames.
Links:
Opening cut-scene for Head Touches Place: the Black Pyramid
I am an Augmented Reality Creator (PBS Digital Studios/Indie Alaska episode from 2014)