Cornelia Sollfrank
Cornelia Sollfrank (1960, Feilershammer) is an artist, researcher and university lecturer, living in Berlin. She studied painting at the Academy of Art in Munich (1987-90), fine art at the University of the Arts Hamburg (1990-94), and received her PhD from the University of Dundee (UK).
Her means of expression include writing, performance, sound, video and (other) Internet-based formats. Recurring subjects in her artistic and academic work about digital cultures are authorship, self-organization, gender and techno-feminism. As a pioneer of Internet art, Sollfrank built up a reputation with two central projects: the net.art generator, a web-based machine producing art, and Female Extension (1997), her hack of the first competition for Internet art initiated by a museum in which she flooded the museum's network with submissions by 300 virtual female net artists.
Her experiments with the basic principles of aesthetic modernism implied conflicts with its institutional and legal framework and led to her academic research. In her dissertation Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property, Sollfrank investigated the conflicting relationship between art and copyright.
The current artistic research project Giving What You Don’t Have brings together art projects that all contribute to the creating and maintenance of digital commons. Her recent performance À la recherche de l’information perdue is about gender stereotypes in the digital underground.
She was a member of the collectives 'frauen-und-technik' and '-Innen', initiated the Cyberfemininist alliance known as Old Boys Network, and facilitated the conference series Next Cyberfeminist International.
Websites:
- female extension -- http://www.obn.org/femext
- net.art generator -- http://www.obn.org/generator
- liquid hacking laboratory -- http://www.obn.org/LHL
- women hackers -- http://www.obn.org/hackers
- old boys network -- http://www.obn.org
- improved tele-vision -- http://www.artwarez.org/improvedTV
- Interviews
- Josephine Bosma, "Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank", 1997.
- Links
