Manifesting randomness
Alexandra Ehrlich-Speiser creates manifestations of the random. Using arbitrary decisions and consciously brought about glitches in machines and digital systems she creates poetic experiences that recontextualize the normal, producing works that are both surprising and unexpected while immediately making sense as if they had been the initial intention all along. Ehrlich began her explorations of controlling outcomes through relinquishing control by diving into the dark net, arguably the realm of randomness due to its vast scope and anarchist lack of structure, where she downloaded instructions for weapons and subverted the deadly objects into aesthetically pleasing tokens of peace by glitching their code with lyrics, sounds and lines from poetry, creating her first series of objects, Useless Weapons, an instant success in the art world, gaining her invitations to renowned national and internation art fairs. Having hit the ground running, rather than becoming the type of artist who repeats herself to form a more recognizable brand on Instagram, she decided to stay true to her initial impulse to becoming an artist in the first place: to help herself and others deal with an incomprehensibly complex universe we can only ever understand on its surface level. Seeking to peel away the superficial “sensible” layers of life she kept expanding her repertoire, creating manifestations of the true nature of the world as she sees it, with the underlying principle of everything being: random. After creating digital and glitch art which utilizes AI to expose anything as being potentially anything, with only our conscious act defining it as something, she soon turned to other media, eventually landing at that seemingly least random technique of classical oil painting. However, by combining it with digital art and glitched elements, Ehrlich subverts also this genre, depriving it of the comforting determinedness that a pre-meditated painting motif would suggest. Today any piece by Ehrlich uses the uncontrollable, the unexpected, chance and destruction to create rifts in meaning and predictability which elecit various levels of disorientation and irritation as well as their exact opposites of familiarity, calm and consolation, as the viewer realizes that the vast arbitrariness that often governs our lives is both a blessing and a source of joy as well as a curse and the cause of pain, loneliness and suffering. By bringing elements of chaos into her work she creates paradoxes by exposing meaning and meaninglessness at once, two unreconcilable poles which come to act as a kind of perpetuum mobile, eternal and unresolvable contradtictions producing tension which is an ongoing source of inspiration and provocation. Seen this way, Ehrlich’s art is a form of rebellion that provides relief and consolation and finds life, joy and affirmation in a display of the invincible force of creativity.