Cornelia Sollfrank

Cornelia Sollfrank is an artist, researcher and university lecturer who is based in Berlin. She studied Fine Art at the Munich Art Academy and Hamburg University of the Arts and completed a PhD at University of Dundee (UK). Recurring subjects in her artistic work in and about digital media and network culture are new forms of (political) organization, authorship and intellectual property, gender and techno-feminism. As a pioneer of Internet art, Cornelia Sollfrank built a reputation with three central projects: the net.art generator – a web-based art-producing ‘machine,’ Female Extension – her famous hack of the first competition for Internet art, and her activities related to Cyberfeminism – such as initiating and running the Old Boys Network (1997-2001).

In her PhD “Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property,” she investigated the increasingly conflicting relationship between art and copyright which led her to her current interest in digital commons and their aesthetics. Her most recent performance À la recherche de l’information perdue is about gender stereotypes in the digital underground. She is currently working at Zürich University of the Arts as associate researcher in the project “Creating Commons.” Her projects and lectures have been presented internationally at museums, art festivals, universities and conferences.