Specter
It is always nighttime in the Metaverse

Whowle (2021)
Harriet Davey

How does making avatars affect your sense of identity?

“Obsessed with questioning what it means to be fluid and human in a digital world, much of my work involves the creation and ‘photographing’ of virtual people. I create impossible posthuman forms and figures in full digital CGI, before posing or animating them and rendering these images. Attempting to stick to truthful and nuanced storytelling, I believe I form very real portraits of unreal characters. These subjects are fluid in all forms. Diversity and inclusion is not sought, but rather generated by hand. The viewer should not regard a character’s weirdness in their gender, race, nudity, ability, or expression, but rather dwell on their strangely glowing eyes, clothes formed of rippling glass, or their twisted glitching movements.

Whowle; my alter ego, my metaverse roaming avatar, is my purest exploration into my gender experience and self-expression. They are everything laid out on the table to be seen. I am them, they are me. Together we reach a point of balance between harsh and soft, femme and masc, tender and brutal.”