Zoe Hatziyannaki’s work explores the interstitial space between reality and digitality, reflecting upon the rapid evolution of technology and its intersection with both natural and urban environments. As a professor, her approach to photography and digital media is deeply influenced by her lived experiences and extensive research.

The installation interrogates the contemporary classroom, focusing on the growing prevalence of technology in higher education and its impact on both physical and virtual spaces. Hatziyannaki aims to reframe the classroom and the surrounding courtyard as both a physical and psychological space, one that has become increasingly alienating and distanced through the infiltration of technological norms. Her work directly confronts how these digital tools redefine the natural environment, as well as teaching and learning as inherently human skills.

While juxtaposing the increasing virtualization of our lives with the tangible yet increasingly sterile natural environments we occupy, Hatziyannaki critiques the superficiality with which we interact with nature through technology. Her practice resonates with themes of alienation, isolation, and surveillance, drawing connections to the concept of the panopticon and self-hyperawareness in a world where each interaction feels mediated through a screen and the companies that sell them. In this unsettling, fragmented world, she questions whether we can still genuinely experience nature or if it has merely become a backdrop or stage for another performance for the lens, stripped of its authenticity by the technological constructs that surround us.

Text by Amelia McRae

* Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, 1923