Cornelia Sollfrank


Cornelia Sollfrank is an artist who pioneered Net Art and Cyberfeminism in the 1990s.

Life and work

In 1997 Sollfrank hacked the "world's first" net art competition, Extension, organized by the Hamburg Art Museum in Germany. Her work titled Female Extension involved the creation of 289 computer-generated websites created by combing the Internet and combining fragments of HTML into exquisite corpse-like websites. Each website was submitted under the name of a different artificial female artist. No women were awarded prizes, but press releases distributed by Sollfrank received widespread attention for her intervention, overshadowing the gallery's own awards.
Cornelia Sollfrank founded the organization Old Boys Network. In 1997, it organized the Cyberfeminist International at documenta x in Kassel, Germany. Old Boys Network published First Cyberfeminist International in 1998 followed by next Cyberfeminist International in 1999. Closely associated with Cyberfeminism, Sollfrank has expressed reservations that it limits the perception of her work as "womens issues".
Solfrank has also founded the artist groups frauen-und-technik and -Innen. Women Hackers was an essay on hackers, focusing on the lack of recognition of female hackers.
In 2004 Cornelia Sollfrank's monograph titled net.art generator was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg.
Sollfrank is a member of the Chaos Computer Club.