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

This exhibition presents outcomes from my doctoral research, Material Causality: A Practice-Led Inquiry into the Aleatory Operations of Concrete. The project examines concrete as a systemic material embedded in infrastructure and everyday life. In pathways, courtyards, hydrological channels, barriers, slabs, and civic surfaces, concrete gives form to movement, exposure, visibility, and use. Its familiarity allows it to settle into the world with the force of common sense. My research asks how that force takes hold, and how artistic practice can engage the material, perceptual, and temporal procedures through which concrete organises experience.

The philosophical ground of the project is Louis Althusser’s aleatory materialism. This philosophy understands structures as the result of contingent encounters that acquire durability through repetition. What appears settled has come together historically and held long enough to assume the force of necessity. Central to this account is the clinamen: a small swerve or deviation through which formation begins. In my research, the clinamen becomes a working method. I use it to think about how small, precise deviations introduced within an existing system can disclose that system’s contingency. From this, I develop what I call deviation-as-method: a practice-led strategy that introduces calibrated displacements into the signal, image, and temporal procedures of concrete infrastructure.

This framework expands through several key thinkers. Étienne Balibar helps me understand infrastructure as a hybrid apparatus, where spaces, institutions, practices, and forms of perception operate together. Warren Montag sharpens the role of repetition, showing how stability is reproduced through continual reiteration. Michel Serres is vital to the project because he reconceives order as something that emerges from turbulence. In his writing, form takes shape through disturbance, inflection, and patterned rotation. Hanjo Berressem extends this insight by showing how systems sustain themselves through fluctuation and modulation. Together, these thinkers allow me to understand concrete as a conjunctural material whose authority emerges through alignment, repetition, and systemic organisation, and whose coherence remains open to deviation.

The three major works in the exhibition apply this method across three operational registers: signal, image, and time. North of a Solid Ground engages the signal register. A dislodged roadside concrete block is translated through databending into a distorted waveform and presented as a shifting luminous figure on a monitor. The work carries concrete into a field of frequency, calibration, and interference. Signal instability becomes the clinaminal event, a procedural swerve that brings hidden dependencies of infrastructural coherence into view.

A Singular Horizon I & II engages the image register. The work begins with a garden plot held within a concrete courtyard. Concrete appears here as frame, containment, horizon, and spatial script. It establishes the geometry of the site, directs exposure, and structures the conditions through which the plot can be imaged. Using photogrammetry, I reconstructed this bounded space and pushed the process toward saturation and drift. The resulting prints hold together as images while also carrying duplications, separations, and spatial failures. These deviations bring concrete’s ordering force into perceptual view. The work shows how an unseen concrete frame can persist within the image as the condition of its structure.

Motion in Division engages the temporal register through fixed-frame cinematography of water moving through concrete hydrological infrastructures in Tokyo, Ljubljana, and Canberra. Here, concrete appears through the pacing of flow, accumulation, release, and delay. Slow cuts and location sound allow recursive patterns and subtle shifts in intensity to emerge. The work draws on duration as a way of sensing infrastructure. Time becomes the medium through which the patterned organisation of concrete hydrological systems can be felt.

Also included in the exhibition is a studio test that points toward the next stage of the research. In it, light of varying intensity is directed onto a concrete footing beneath a bridge and reflected into my eye, filming the eye’s adjustment. This experiment extends the project into the field of visual adaptation and explores how concrete participates in the conditions of seeing through reflection, glare, and exposure.

I situate these works within the field of operational images, following Harun Farocki, and within Jussi Parikka’s account of invisual infrastructures. In this field, images belong to procedures of measurement, calibration, sensing, navigation, and control. My works engage that terrain through artistic means. They attend to the points where infrastructural operations become perceptible in waveform, photogrammetric drift, hydrological pacing, reflection, and adaptation. In that sense, the exhibition presents images, sounds, and durations as critical procedures within larger systems. Across the works, artistic practice enters the operational logics of infrastructure and introduces deviations into them. The exhibition opens concrete as a historical and contingent formation, and invites a renewed encounter with the material procedures that shape everyday life.