Augmented reality for me, has always been a really good place to put my stories.

You find something that is really curious and feels out of place, and then the more you interact with it.

The Easter egg opens up all these other connections to the rest of the world, or all these other meanings.

So that's where when I write stories or tell stories, those are kind of the spaces I'm in.

It's like a really fantastic jump into this other world where we get to place things.

When the original Alaska video was shot, I was actually in the middle of making a piece for the Anchorage Centennial.

It was called Anchorage Narrative, so it was just it was four stories set in Anchorage, and they were published in forum magazine.

And I augmented every one of the stories.

There's a couple communities in Alaska where elders would invite me during the summer to come work with kids in the village.

Usually we'd do an augmented reality workshop.

So with a couple of them, I'd say like, wouldn't it be cool if if we just took all these amazing things about all these amazing, amazingly diverse or different cultural aspects of Alaska and put it into a comic book that has an Inupiat mother and daughter.

They're going to be cyberpunk.

I did student eight years ago, love the way she taught.

Her cadence was like a very autistic cadence.

And we were drawing comics together one day and I was like, you know, I would totally love to use your cadence in a story.

One time.

And she was like, okay.

One of the main characters in Winter mode.

Her name's arete.

She's got glacier powers and she's autistic.

Inside the comic book, they're trying to find this bad guy that's absconded with some technology or something.

Then they're on an ice field, and so she decides she's going to talk to ice worms to get the information, because the ice worms have the information.

So she goes to this whole process of how do you communicate with the species that's not human.

So the augmented reality, I made an animation of her info dumping on top of her comic book, and I had pages and pages of her dialog, but I put it so that whatever she actually said to other people was just in the comic.

When you put the augmented reality over top of it, you see all the things she's wanting to say and thinking in her head and processing quietly.

But she really wanted to say it's 3 or 400 pages worth of information on these little worms.

What I did want to show was the way a super interesting autistic brain would process having magic powers, doing something that superheroes do.

We're not supposed to talk about all the things that are interesting to us.

You know, we have to hold on to all these fascinating things.

So the augmented reality is a space where you can just info down.

In winter move.

Part of the story involves having this space elevator that's made out of driftwood and living glacial ice.

I had actually drawn that space elevator back in 2001.

This is part of, like, why winter mode ended up getting the creative capital.

The way I'm doing that comic book is because I'm working with other people.

I draw the pictures on my own.

I do all the editing and stuff on my own, but all of the content is generated out of a much different sphere.

How do you write about Alaska?

But for the most part, most content is generated out of conversations with people.

We live in an age where media consumption is a little different than it was.

The social practice aspect of it.

You're building understanding.

I think doing it in ways that are exciting.

So putting it in a video game, putting it in an augment, putting it in virtual reality increases the people coming to it for different reasons.

And then leaving changed.