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

My doctoral research, Material Causality: A Practice-Led Inquiry into the Aleatory Operations of Concrete (completed 2026), examines concrete as a systemic medium: a substrate through which infrastructural power is organised, repeated, and rendered ideologically neutral. Across footpaths, courtyards, hydrological channels, barriers, slabs, and civic surfaces, concrete standardises environments while modulating movement, flow, exposure, and perception. My research examines how artistic practice can engage the types infrastructural operations of concrete and introduces targeted disruptions that make perceptible the contingent routines through which concrete systems organise the flow of matter, information, and perception.

The philosophical ground of the project is Louis Althusser’s aleatory materialism. Aleatory materialism 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 my framework is the clinamen: the minimal deviation through which encounter, formation, and transformation become possible. In this research, I adopt the clinamen as an operative principle and develop what a I term deviation-as-method: a practice-led strategy that embeds calibrated disruptions within the procedural logics of infrastructure. Through this method, I engage concrete as a system of material, perceptual, and procedural operations and position artistic practice as a means of intervening within the alignments that sustain its authority.

My framework is extended through Étienne Balibar, Warren Montag, Michel Serres, and Hanjo Berressem. Balibar’s account of hybrid apparatuses help us understand how spaces, institutions, practices, and forms of perception operate together. Montag sharpens the role of repetition, showing how apparent stability is reproduced through continual reiteration. Serres theorises turbulence as a generative inflection within systems, and Berressem shows how systems sustain coherence through fluctuation and modulation. These thinkers provide the conceptual basis for understanding concrete as a conjunctural material. Its dominance emerges from alignments of technical capacity, labour organisation, governance, and aesthetic ideology, while its apparent stability depends on iterative practices of repetition, maintenance, and regulation.

The three major works produced in the research apply ‘deviation-as-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 Tektronix 760A stereo audio monitor. In this format, concrete is carried 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.

This visualisation from my exegesis (fig. 11) maps Serres’ argument of (1) how forms of physical order become possible,(2) that forms of order only remain coherent when reinforced in a cycle of patterned rotation, and (3) all systems, irrespective of how stable they seem (like concrete), always hold the potential to shift back into chaotic multiplicity if the systems that hold reinforce order are no longer reinforced. In my research, I use Serres’ proposition as a way of seeing the contemporary condition of concrete as something other than stable or inevitable, and use creative practice to tests ways that the patterned rotations that sustain concrete’s apparent order can be visualised. Image: Ren Gregorčič 2026.

A Singular Horizon I & II engages the image register. The work depicts a garden plot framed within the internal concrete courtyard of a disused high school. Instead of appearing direclty, concrete appears in the work as frame, containment, horizon, and spatial script that establishes the geometry of the site that in turn structures the conditions through which the plot exists and can be imaged. Using photogrammetry, I reconstructed the garden plot pushed the process toward saturation. 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.