Cornelia Sollfrank
Cornelia Sollfrank (PhD) is an artist, researcher and university lecturer, currently living in Berlin (Germany). She has studied painting at the Academy of Art in Munich and Fine Art at the University of the Arts Hamburg, and got her PhD from 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, Cornelia Sollfrank built up a reputation with two central projects: the net.art generator – a web-based art-producing ‘machine,’ and Female Extension – her famous hack of the first competition for Internet art. 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 PhD “Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property,” Cornelia investigated the increasingly 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 most recent performance “À la recherche de l’information perdue” is about gender stereotypes in the digital underground.