Vladislav Delay

Late last year I went to see Vladislav Delay, an electronic music artist from Finland, perform in the Argus Building, a derelict art nouveau office tower in Melbourne. I enjoyed it immensely and wrote some notes about it a few days later.

Every work of art contains a theory of art. I learnt the following about art from Vladislav Delay.

1. In Vladislav Delay we experience the total colonisation of our world by machinery, the realisation that the ghost is the machine, that technology is technique.

2. The work of art that takes time as it takes place can only take form momentarily; each form is successively crushed and the particles rearranged carefully. (Or: matter can be neither created nor destroyed; it is constantly in flux.)

3. Such works of art have a fine-grained consistency apart from any form.

4. The ghostly machine dies as soon as it takes form, producing a new machine out of itself, an interruption in the fine-grained consistency that is accommodated unconditionally but never assimilated. Many machines are at work.

5. Never demand chronological consistency of an artwork. Instead,

6. Immerse yourself in the artwork’s consistency, in the particular materials on whose changing organisation any new form is precipitated.

7. The artwork may be encountered as an event (or a series of events) but it does not consist in events. Its consistency precedes all events.

8. In Vladislav Delay, the creation and dissolution of forms by machinery is the aesthetic self-organisation of a volatile elemental consistency.

Melbourne, November 2012