Cornelia Sollfrank (born 1960) is a German digital artist, she was an early pioneer of Net Art and Cyberfeminism in the 1990s.
Closely associated with Cyberfeminism, Sollfrank has expressed reservations that it limits the perception of her work as "women's issues".
[8] Solfrank has also founded the artist groups frauen-und-technik (Women and Technique) and -Innen ("Inside", but also a suffix for feminine plurals in German).
In 2004, Cornelia Sollfrank's monograph titled net.art generator was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg.
Since 1998, Sollfrank has focused on writing and exploring issues regarding the relationship among media, art and gender, and has worked as an educator at a variety of universities.
In 2012, along with the publication of her PhD thesis titled Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property, Sollfrank completed her doctor degree's practice-led research at the University of Dundee (UK).
From the mid-1990s, as Sollfrank probed the worldwide communication networks and mass media, she then transformed her traditional artistic strategies and art forms into the digital medium, and her works began to be closely related to the concerns of cyberfeminism, the interaction of feminism and art in the age of the Internet, and relationship between gender politics and the Internet.
As an early pioneer of Net Art and Cyberfeminism, Sollfrank also has experiences of organizing and participating in digital protests, she puts emphasis on issues of marginalization and the lack of recognition of female hackers in both mainstream and alternative cyborg communities.
The term “OBN” is used to describe social and business connection among wealthy white men who often attend male-only elite schools, which also refers to a network of gender ritual and economic privilege where male members support each other to maintain their mutual benefits.
Documenta is a major international exhibition of contemporary art which holds the show for 100 days and takes place every five years in Germany.
As it is stated in the First Report from the First Cyberfeminist International (CI), “there was a strong feeling voiced that this was an historic moment, that this week is a momentous launching of a visible, global presence of cyberfeminism as a networked movement in cyberspace.” According to Faith Wilding, cyberfeminism at this time started to “draw on social and cultural strategies from past waves of feminism” (Wilding 1998, 53), and the intervention of cyberfeminism here “could create possibilities of replacing coded, stereotyped, and standardized gendered representations of women with much more fluid, multivocal, recombinant, and hybrid images” (Wilding 1998, 55).
I’m not a big fan of ‘isms’ in general — like hackism J — but the fact is that we are far from having equal rights and opportunities for men and women.
Sollfrank has also talked about issues regarding marginalized and ignored women in cyborg community in her essay “Women Hackers,” she stated that “no matter what area of application and no matter what the objective, the borderlines of gender are still maintained,” and among all the technological spheres, “hacking is a purely male domain, and in that sense a clearly gendered space” (Sollfrank 1999, 8).