" ... During this residency I concentrated on the narrow zone where asphalt shifts into gravel and soil. I drove the same country roads on many occasions and mounted a camera to the passenger-side mirror, tilted downward so the frame held the surface at the road’s edge. This repeated route became a kind of moving studio. Each day the strip at the edge of the seal shifted under different light, temperature, and traffic, and began to appear less as a margin and more as a seam where several material processes met. The area drew my attention because it combined pressure and fragility, order and erosion, in a single continuous line. The edge felt like a question laid into the road. Alongside this work I read Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. His description of the observer as something formed within arrangements of surfaces, instruments, and habits gave structure to what I was doing on these drives. Each excursion placed me inside a constellation that included the car, the mirror, the road surface, the position of the camera, and the established protocols of movement along those roads. The edge of the asphalt became a point in this constellation where attention intensified. There, the relation between perception and its technical and institutional supports moved from background to foreground. I began to treat each drive as a small inquiry into how vision emerges from a field of constraints and affordances rather than from an isolated act of will.
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| Ren Gregorčič, still from filming session, Gunyah residency |
The filming sessions produced a close study of how the edge accumulates marks of contact and change. Heat opened fissures in the seal, water carved small channels, tyres drew out feathered rims of loose aggregate, plant growth pressed into cracks and joins. The line read less as a simple crossing from “road” to “not-road” and more as an event that carries the history of many small encounters. Boundaries in this context appeared as formations that depend on work, decision, and repair. This raised a philosophical question that informed my thinking throughout the residency: when a limit depends on continuous labour to hold its form, how should we understand its claim to permanence, and what kind of responsibility accompanies that claim?
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| Ren Gregorčič, still from filming session, Gunyah residency |
Crary’s account of modern visuality, in which seeing is redistributed across devices, surfaces, and institutional logics, resonated with the experience of watching the edge through the mirror while the car moved. The act of looking emerged from the relation between bodily sensation, mechanical vibration, the weight of the vehicle, the curvature of the road, and the small adjustments needed to keep the line within the frame. The observer in this project appeared as a set of movements and judgements that shifted with terrain, speed, light, and weather. Perception felt less like a fixed capacity and more like an effect of cooperation between body and apparatus. The residency created time to register this cooperation, and to consider what it means for any philosophical account of experience. The edge began to function as an instrument for thought. Each drive produced feedback about the stability of the arrangement I was working within. The rumble of tyres on the outer strip, the narrowing of the sealed surface, the fading of paint, and the patchwork of repairs all signalled changes in how the road met the ground that supported it. These signals pointed to a larger theme: structures reveal their principles most clearly where they approach their limits. The road’s edge condensed questions about form, contact, and endurance. How long can a given order hold under the pressures that meet it. What kinds of adjustment are considered acceptable, and which fractures signal a need for new decisions.
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| Ren Gregorčič, still from filming session, Gunyah residency |
Over the course of the residency, this project evolved into an exploration of perception as something shaped through ongoing interaction with specific material and technical ensembles. Thought arose through movement and repetition rather than withdrawal. The mirror, the camera, the car, and the edge formed a configuration that generated questions about orientation and the formation of the observer. How do available paths shape what becomes visible? What forms of understanding emerge when attention turns toward zones where systems thin and loosen? How might philosophy proceed when it begins not from an abstract subject but from a strip of asphalt that records the meeting of structure and world? ..."
Gunyah residency report, September 2025
Ren Gregorčič @ren.gregorcic www.rengregorcic.com
