Material Causality: A Practice-Led Inquiry into the Aleatory Operations of Concrete | Ren Gregorčič

Concrete is among the most widely used materials on Earth, second only to water in global consumption. It forms footpaths, bridges, building foundations, dam walls, and the hydrological networks that span a continuum from everyday surfaces to continental-scale infrastructure. Operating across spatial and procedural scales, concrete standardises environments while modulating movement, flow, and perception. Developed from my practice-led doctoral research, this exhibition examines concrete as a systemic medium: a substrate through which infrastructural power is organised, repeated, and rendered ideologically neutral.

Grounded in Louis Althusser’s philosophy of aleatory materialism and the concept of the clinamen, the exhibition presents three major artworks, North of a Solid Ground, A Singular Horizon I & II, and Motion in Division. Produced through waveform modulation, photogrammetric collapse, and fixed-frame cinematography, these works are designed to intervene in instances of concrete infrastructure through specific operational registers: signal, image, and time. The purpose of these interventions is to introduce targeted disruptions that visualise the contingent routines through which concrete systems organise the flow of matter, information, and perception.

These interventions are enacted through deviation-as-method, a practice-led strategy I developed that introduces procedural displacements into the conjunctural formations of concrete infrastructure. Drawing on Étienne Balibar’s theorisation of hybrid apparatuses, Warren Montag’s account of repetition as contingent reproduction, and Michel Serres’s and Hanjo Berressem’s articulations of turbulence and systemic modulation, I construct a framework that links contingency to infrastructural formation and positions artistic practice within the operational logics of concrete-based systems.

Drawing on Harun Farocki’s concept of the operational image and Jussi Parikka’s theory of invisuality, I situate the three works within contemporary infrastructural regimes to examine how infrastructures structure control through iterative processes of calibration, sensing, and modulation. The exhibition demonstrates that artistic practice can operate within infrastructural procedures by introducing calibrated deviations that recondition the perceptual and systemic authority of concrete-based environments.

This exhibition is presented as part of a Higher Degree by Research examination. Please note that the Gallery will be closed to the public during examination times.