Cornelia Sollfrank

Cornelia Sollfrank treats the internet as both artistic medium and an ideological system to be challenged. Grounded in conceptual art, software experimentation, and cyberfeminist intervention, her practice investigates how digital networks and cultural institutions assign value, authority, and ownership. Trained in fine art in Munich and Hamburg, she began bringing these inquiries to the emerging World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.

Her seminal 1997 work Female Extension established her reputation as a pioneer of net art and institutional critique. Responding to the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s inaugural net art competition, Sollfrank deployed automated scripts to flood the open call with 289 fictional female artist identities and algorithmically scraped web-collages. While the museum publicly touted the resulting surge in female applicants, the all-male jury awarded every major prize to men. Sollfrank's subsequent revelation of the hoax exposed the performative diversity metrics and patriarchal gatekeeping of both traditional museums and nascent digital cultures.

In 1998, Sollfrank expanded these generative and critical tactics with net.art generator. Developed in collaboration with programmers, the software allows users to input search terms to scrape, recombine, and generate new digital collages, dispersing authorship across the artist, coders, users, and source material. Works from this series—including anonymous-warhol_flowers and This is not by me—interrogate copyright, originality, and the mechanics of cultural reproduction through appropriation of Andy Warhol’s iconic motifs.

Collective action and institutional infrastructure form an equally vital dimension of Sollfrank’s career. In the late 1990s, she co-founded collectives including frauen-und-technik, -Innen, and the influential Old Boys Network (OBN), which organized the first Cyberfeminist International at Documenta X. In the decades since, her practice has expanded into academic research on digital commons, open-source governance, and data politics, yielding influential publications such as Aesthetics of the Commons and Fix My Code (with Winnie Soon).

In 2022, Sollfrank extended her longstanding examination of digital ownership to the blockchain with OG flowers, an NFT exhibition organized with panke.gallery and OFFICE IMPART. By minting generative images rooted in unauthorized appropriation and copyleft principles as unique cryptographic tokens, she transformed the emerging crypto market into another testing ground for the paradoxes of digital value, scarcity, and authorship.