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German

1960

Cornelia Sollfrank is a Berlin-based artist and cyberfeminist whose work challenges authorship, copyright, and power in digital culture through projects like Female Extension and the net.art generator. A co-founder of the Old Boys Network, she has played a key role in shaping cyberfeminist discourse and critical internet culture.

Cornelia Sollfrank (2004). Photo courtesy Cornelia Sollfrank, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Full Bio

Cornelia Sollfrank was born in 1960 in Feilershammer, Germany. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and later completed her degree with distinction at the University of the Arts in Hamburg. In 2012, she earned a practice-led PhD from the University of Dundee, where she focused on the tensions between intellectual property and digital art. Her practice has consistently merged research, teaching, and activism, with feminist thought shaping both her approach and perspective.

Sollfrank’s work challenges systems of value, authorship, and originality. In Female Extension (1997), she submitted hundreds of fake entries by fictional female artists to a net art competition, exposing gender bias in institutional frameworks. Her long-running project net.art generator invites users to produce works via automated software, raising questions about creative agency in an era of machines. In This Is Not By Me (2006–2007), she explored copyright and authorship by reproducing Warhol’s Flowers using generative tools and exhibiting the work across countries with different legal frameworks. Across these and other projects, she continues to use subversion and critical reflection to highlight how power operates through both cultural and digital systems.

Her work has been shown internationally, with exhibitions at Plug.In in Basel, Kunstverein Hildesheim, Mag:net Gallery in Manila, Kunsthalle Bergen, Frauenmuseum Bonn, ICA London, and Documenta X in Kassel. She has played a central role in shaping cyberfeminist discourse, co-founding the Old Boys Network and helping organize the First Cyberfeminist International. Beyond her individual practice, she has worked to strengthen critical internet culture in Germany through platforms like echo, a long-running mailing list for art and cultural criticism, and The Thing Hamburg, an online magazine she co-edited. In 2025, she was awarded the HAP Grieshaber Prize. She lives and works in Berlin, where she continues to explore how art can intervene in systems of knowledge, technology, and power.