Cornelia Sollfrank

Cornelia Sollfrank
Unlimited Edition
29.1-15.3 2009

In the mid 1990s, Cornelia Sollfrank was among the pioneers of net.art and has since been an important influence, networking key individuals in what has become known as cyberfeminism. New media and new media art regularly appears, often embarrassingly so, to be a male-dominated business; an observation equally valid for net.art, even though it has always viewed itself as an open and liberated alternative to the establishment.

When Hamburger Kunsthalle became one of the first traditional art institutions to organise a competition to produce a jury-elected net.art exhibition, Sollfrank took the opportunity to create new pieces of net.art by letting a computer programme combine material collected from the Internet. To each of these pieces the name of a fictional female artist was given and it was these almost 300 ‘artists’ who took part in the competition. Neither the jury nor the Kunsthalle discovered the hoax and instead, satisfied with the huge number of entries, declared that two thirds of the proposals had come from women.

The computer programme has since been improved and now exists in five different versions, gen_01–gen_05. Sollfrank has used this software to create a series of images that utilise Andy Warhol’s famous flowers as a clear reference and in the exhibition Unlimited Edition she even offers the audience the opportunity to create their own images.

As a male Pop art icon, Warhol has been an obvious connection and reference point for Sollfrank, and over the years she has continually returned to him. With Warhol by her side, she has used her own work as a test case to explore the complex fields of Pop art, authorship and copyright. In her video installation Legal Perspectives, she presents four different lawyers who discuss the projects and in the video I Don’t Know we hear Warhol speak for himself.