Andrea Grützner

HIVE

HIVE (2017-2023)

In my photographic practice I am particularly interested in variations of architecture designed to infl uence the behavior of its users. Based on photographical material shot in 2017 at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) campus in Melbourne, Australia, Hive is a subjective visual description of contemporary educational infrastructure. In this project I emphasize my responses to the campus through diverse manipulations of the photographs, pushing the resulting images to abstraction.
I attempt to reveal the playful interior, but also the artificial nature of the space and the ambiguity that exists within. I found the labyrinth of passages,doors and then rooms to act as a metaphor for gamifi cation: both orientation and alienation are physical and virtual in modern society. By borrowing titles for the pictures from neoliberal dialect, my aim is to gesture to the notions that fl exibility and creativity are key and that the distinction between leisure and work time has been erased.This pedagogical space appears to have been designed to be Instagrammed, with bold and colorful interiors seemingly inspired by retro computer games. Through digital collage techniques: combining digital scans of celluloid negatives, mobile phone images and fragments of pictures from social media channels, I aim to explore the infrastructure of image sharing, one of the driving forces of networked life. This strategy leads to a hyperbolic representation of real physical space. Through these interventions the functionality of the interior is intentionally distorted, while the architectural strategy is evident: a blend of virtual and real worlds that has direct infl uence on people.