Cornelia Sollfrank studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and Fine Arts at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (1987–1994). She holds a PhD from the University of Dundee (UK). Her artistic practice tightly intertwines with her academic research. In order to make the resources of one field useful for another, Sollfrank works both independently and in collaboration with various institutions. As an artist and researcher, she has been continuously working with such topics as authorship and intellectual property, aesthetics of the digital commons, gender and techno-feminism, artistic infrastructures, as well as (political) self-organization, and performativity of data. Feminist principles are at the origins of her practice and way of thinking. She works on individual projects as well as in groups and collectives. She co-founded three female artist groups: frauen-und-technik (women-and-technology), -Innen and #purplenoise.

C. Sollfrank’s central projects as an artist are Female Extension (1997); the net.art generator (1998–); and her activities related to cyberfeminism—initiating and running organizations and communication structures, such as the Old Boys Network (1997–2001).

Female Extension was Sollfrank’s famous hack of Extension—the first competition for Internet art held by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1997. The artist generated 127 individual projects for fictive female net artists with the help of a computer program that collected and automatically recombined HTML material found on the World Wide Web. Despite theoretically higher chances for those female artists to get a prize due to Sollfrank’s hack, the top three awards were all given to male artists. Her intervention remained undiscovered and was later revealed by Sollfrank herself in a press release.

The net.art generator, as a computer program that collects and collages material from the Internet to create new contents, is a descendant of Female Extension. Since 1997, five different versions of this work have been realized in collaboration with seven programmers: nag_01 to nag_05. The generators differ according to whether they are more text- or image-oriented. Unfortunately, nag_05 is the only version still functioning at the moment, since, over time, search engines limited free access to their search results. The generated artworks are stored online and recent results are available to download. With net.art generator, the artist tests new forms of authorship and deconstructs the existing myths of genius and originality. The work raises essential questions about the nature of art in the digital age and the “material” of digital media, as well as new media art preservation and restoration. These questions have become even more complex and intriguing with AI entering the artistic field. In its glitchy aesthetics, net.art generator anticipated this latter development.

Further artworks by Sollfrank include a series of works on the topic of Women Hackers (1999/2000); reenactments of early feminist performances in Revisiting Feminist Art (2006–); and the conceptual music piece Improved Tele-vision (2001/2011). Her lecture-performance À la recherche de l’information perdue (2017) is a comment on the case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I am not a local girl (2019) is a retrospective poetic view of her cultural-political interventions in Hamburg between 1997 and 2005.