Designing Utopias: How We Want to Live In The Future – Harriet Davey

When the reality of the world seems somber and gray, when everything magical, fantastic seems as if it had disappeared forever, often the only thing that helps is to escape into a new universe. A universe that a creative person has invented to imagine parallel existences and to open up fresh perspectives. Harriet Davey (she/they) is such a person. Scrolling through their Instagram profile feels like traveling into fantastical realms inhabited by ethereal creatures just waiting to tell you about their lives tinted in otherworldly color palettes.

The 3D artist who when they first moved to Berlin in 2019 was one of the first members of the FLINT-focused collective digi-gxl Berlin, has since graduated and wowed big names like Y3 or newcomer brands like Kill via Kindness with her digitally created, gender-fluid characters. She has designed avatars for music videos, presented them in exhibitions and recently immortalized them as NFT works. The 25-year-old never runs out of ideas – but allocating their resources as a freelancer in such a way that Harriet doesn’t burn out was a learning process for them. And today, this form of sustainable work is a privilege she does not take for granted: because the point at which they dared to say ‘no’ in order to take care of herself and protect her principles was also the point at which she could eventually afford it financially. “When I’m working with clients I try not to work with people whose ethos doesn’t align with mine, even though especially in the beginning you can’t be really picky about who you’re working for,” says Harriet. “It’s super nice that I’m now in a position where I am able to bring on extra people to my projects and hire them through friends, through the community.”

Community in the context of real life relationships, their art and work plays an important role for Harriet – it’s not an inflationary buzzword, but a lived ideal that is also evident in the way she understands knowledge transfer and mutual support: “I learned so much for free on the internet, from YouTube, and I want to be able to give back to the communities that raised me as an artist.” She puts this claim into practice, among other things, when she answers questions from interested people in her DMs and tries to give tips on programs and design options. Another platform is Twitch, where Harriet creates avatars together with other artists in live streams or uploads tutorials about her individual approach to designing her 3D creatures. But the reason Harriet started recording tutorials for Twitch was not only to facilitate young people’s future careers on a creative level, but also to change the previously very homogeneous representation: “Until a year ago I never watched a tutorial that wasn’t done by a cis white man, this was really affecting me. It was at that point that it really made me switch and I started putting out tutorials – I’m happy that I can be there also for the people that usually don’t see themselves represented in tutorials.”

They know exactly what they’re talking about, having gained their own experience first in the 3D world and, for just over a year now, in the NFT scene. Both bubbles are still disproportionately dominated by white, heterosexual, cis men. While through digi-gxl Berlin she has quite quickly found access to a growing group of queer people, women, intersex, non-binary and trans people involved in digital arts, in her beginning and orientation time in the cosmos of NFT she repeatedly asked herself the familiar questions: “Where are the femmes? Where are the queers? Where is my bubble?” It is not easy to find out who is behind the digital pseudonyms and avatars, whether they are people whose company Harriet is looking for other people who pose a potential threat to her and her community: “From the outside it’s not visible which is good in a way that it protects us. I guess you could compare it to when you’re from a small village you don’t find other queer people until you move to a city or go to university.”

NFTs are also a polarizing issue apart from the question of representation and solidarity. For some, they are seen as a promising salvation for independent art; for others, they are characterized by scams, alt-right movements, and aesthetically lazy works. The reality makes the proclaimed utopia become fragile. Nevertheless, Harriet remains hopeful, even if the present does not fulfill the promises, maybe it can happen tomorrow: “I have seen a lot of artists who were really struggling to get their art shown and now have some amazing opportunities with galleries. In an ideal world myself and a lot of other artists would be able to live from the work we already make, the work that we want to make instead of having to rely on being a freelancer and applying for grants. It has the potential to be beautiful, maybe we need to wait.”

But the feeling of finally being in the right place at the right time, at least in theory, is a new one for Harriet. Too often, the familiar limbo between ‚no longer‘ and ‚not yet‘ has crept in, but some of the technological developments are showing the 25-year-old possibilities for how she could shape her future, how she could more freely pursue her interests and artistic experiments while working even more closely with her community. So Harriet and some of their friends have given free rein to their wishful thinking and considered what they would do with the NFT-related blockchain technology: “I would love to form a DAO – a Decentralized Autonomous Organization – with a few friends, but none of us have time unfortunately. The potential for these flat hierarchy communities that are self-governing as a way to make decisions is really interesting. If there’s a way to do that and support our own communities, but also redistributing funds for the people that need it and deserve it, sounds pretty utopian to me.”

Many of today’s technologies promise solutions and ideas to improve the future – but in fact they are part of the already existing cycle of consumption, which is increased rather than reduced by these supposed alternatives and rarely lives up to the prophecies, also regarding sustainability. Harriet views the phenomenon of digital fashion with a certain distance: “Digital fashion is not going to replace the real clothes that we have to wear. It’s more of a thought switch that needs to happen: the answer is not to consume that much digitally, the answer is not to consume that much.” And adds: “And where is all that hosted? On clouds, on servers which also have a massive ecological impact.”

This development is emblematic of a broad problem that thinkers such as Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Susan Sontag have recognized in the cultural production of the Global North since the 1980s. According to their critique, a large part of the people in the so-called West have lost the ability to imagine the new, to develop potentials for the future, let alone utopian visions for tomorrow that are detached from the trends of the past and tendencies of the present. For Harriet, too, looking to a bygone era seems to hold more exciting inspirations for the future: “If you look at SciFi illustrations from the 60s, it’s even crazier than anything that anyone’s dreaming up now. When I do think about utopia I think of those utopias from the 60s, of what they thought our time would look like.” And in a way, Harriet sees the utopias from the past already realized in today’s time: “There’s some level of women’s rights, people live longer now, you have accessible health care, you can speak to anyone anywhere at any time, that is a utopia from the past. There are no flying cars, but if you wanted to you can fly anywhere quite cheaply.”

In addition to books – especially fantasy novels – it is video games that help Harriet find new stimulation, escape from reality and indulge in other worlds. They are mainly longform storytelling role-playing games, which invite her to immerse herself in the digital realm, always on a quest for new riddles and multilayered adventures. Here they can switch off and recharge their batteries. But gaming is not just about escapism for them, they feel that games can teach important lessons for ‘real’ life and have an educational value that can influence the future: “I’ve had some games that changed my perspective on things, it gives you perspectives from people that you wouldn’t normally have access to. One game that really blew my mind was ‘Hellblade’, which is about a pre-Viking Celtic warrior that has schizophrenia and psychosis and the developers did the whole research in collaboration with psychologists.”

Another aspect that makes games so exciting is the fact that gender queer individuals in particular can escape their embodied reality and explore their gender identity through avatars. While the most successful games in the mainstream still have a lot of catching up to do in the context of diverse representation, it is the indie games that are pioneers in this field. Especially in those indie companies, there are many queer people working behind the scenes who never saw themselves represented in the games they love, which is why they took matters into their own hands. For Harriet, too, the part where she could create her own avatar was her favorite––even if she was never able to create a character that looked exactly like her due to often limited options: “On the one hand I was never unhappy to be role-playing as men, I actually always really enjoyed that but that’s also because it kind of resonates with my gender identity and I’m happy to do that. I think it’s an important space for self-expression.”

Their 3D art, in which they create avatars and play with different softwares, has also helped them on a personal level to discover their own gender identity and live it out not only when transferred to their creatures. Interestingly, in doing so, it was the shortcomings of the software she uses – there is only one ‘male’ and one ‘female’ base character – that led her to explore coherences between her creative expression and lived persona. Harriet had started with the female base and tried to modify it to the other end, and then tried the same process with a male base, until they suddenly realized that this process was actually their personal way of performing their gender: “I never felt really comfortable doing it in real life, with make-up or with fashion. It wasn’t until 3D and making my own avatar that I was like: ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ It’s completely an exploration of my own identity.”

3D art and virtual game spheres as a safer haven for gender nonconforming people who are oftentimes confronted with a rather hostile real life environment. In this sense technology really provides the means to break free of boundaries and overcome binaries in a creative way, at least in an anonymous setting. For Harriet it was an important step in her development. The freedom to create an alter ego is particularly evident in her brainchild Whowle, an avatar she created for herself rather than for clients: “I’ve just been using them as a kind of exploration. They’re also signed to a model agency which is something that I would never want to do with myself probably, but that’s fun, I would never be walking on a catwalk but Whowle is instead of me.”

In Harriet’s life and work, however, they come together quite naturally. Growing up in the countryside, she says that as a child she ran around like a wild animal. Even though she doesn’t do it anymore, she has retained her love for nature and lives it out when she explores Berlin’s surroundings on her bike. It is in these moments, when their brain can relax, that a mindset full of wondering thoughts emerges. It is in these moments that new ideas come to them for projects they want to realize. The natural landscapes in which her avatars move, give her works the final touch and complete the fascination that emanates from them for the viewers.

“For me the characters come first. And from them I think about the environment, if they’re in tune ecologically with their virtual environments, they all reflect each other a lot. The environments are really inspired by where I grew up,” Harriet explains. The landscape in Yorkshire, northern England, where they grew up, resembled a moorland, with only a few trees, birds walking on the ground instead of flying, and regular moorland fires that would come and wipe a whole hill, leaving it completely black – and two weeks later it would glow in the richest green and new sprouts would shoot up everywhere. This surreal, untouched nature is also reflected in Harriet’s work:

“They’re always full of nature, there’s never any man-made/creature-made assets there and I never really introduce buildings, it’s quite desolate but fertile land with not much visible impact from the creatures. I see a lot of my creatures as being alone in the space, just existing and chilling.” And Harriet’s creatures can thereby teach us a valuable lesson: “These kinds of characters are at peace with their existence and I think that sort of mindset would be really good to just dispel among people.”