net.art generator

Cornelia Sollfrank

Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, ISBN 3936711305
Those who learned about Cornelia Sollfrank thanks to the latest release of her famous net.art generator, have seen only the tip of the iceberg. The artist, hacker and cyberfeminist, in fact, has produced a very interesting body of works in the last five years. Her actions with the group Innen, her sensational operations with the german hacker community, most of all the fake video by Clara G. S0pht which provoked so many reactions during the 2000 edition of the Chaos Communication Congress, her work in coordinating the several editions of the ‘cyberfeminist international’ and her dynamic freedom of movement has defined her as a strategic character in the international debate about new media culture. Her successful effort to implement open systems which reflect the fleeting and shared essence of networks has allowed her to realize this net.art generator, a conceptual operation which succeeded in challenging the concept of authorship of an electronic art work, breaking up the obsolete categories used by critics and curators. The text describes the crisis of the strong paradigms of the art circus, in a virtuous conjunction with the necessary contradictions of gender issues. This is probably one of the greatest merits of Sollfrank: succeeding with extreme elegance, like properly-called hackers, in finding a new point of view to start building flexible systems to bring on the surface the evident contradictions and hypocrisies of the role of women in our society.