Female Extension

Female Extension was a Net art project/ social commentary orchestrated by German Artist Cornelia Sollfrank in 1997. Its purpose was to disrupt the first international Net art competition entitled Extension. Female Extension is seen as an act of Cyberfeminism and Hacktivism

History

In 1997 the Gallery of Contemporary Art from the Hamburg Art Museum in Germany announced a Net art competition called Extension. Extension was the first time an international Net art competition had ever been executed in the mainstream art world. The term “extension” was used to suggest an online expansion or presence of the museum in cyberspace.

Contributing German artist, Cornelia Sollfrank, had more in mind for the competition than just contributing her work. She wanted to test the old rigid system of judging for this new medium, and in the spirit of cyberfeminism, proved that male artists and their work were taken more seriously than their female adversaries.

Sollfrank seemingly tilted the competition in the favor of a female winner. She created 200 different fake female artists and entered their work in the competition. She gave each of them a name, an email address, and a phone number. Each of the fabricated contestants were from either Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, Great Britain, Slovenia, or Austria.

There were 280 total participants in the Extension competition. With Sollfrank’s 200 female entries, this meant two-thirds of the competitors were female. Sollfrank produced the individual Net art pieces by using a single software program. Her program searched the Internet for preexisting HTML content that would then remix the “data and imagery” to produce the entries for her faux artists.

Sollfrank wrote on the project: “Apart from the higher probability to win a prize with this intervention, I also took ‘Internet as material and object,’ the theme of the competition, particularly seriously. Unfortunately, my attempts were not met by success. I did not get a prize for this automatically generated net art. Even though two thirds of the participants were women, the three money prizes went to male artists.”

Sollfrank did not reveal herself until after the winners were announced. She published a press release divulging her experiment. She attributed the results of the Net art competition to, “the widespread sexism that biases the selection of artists for exhibitions.”

She called this project Female Extension, a play on words from the original competition title, as well as referencing the term used to describe the receiving end of an extension cord.
Female Extension is seen as an establishing, and important work in the areas of Hacktivism and Cyberfeminism.

Quotes

"Cyberfeminism is not just a rhetorical strategy, but also a political method."- Cornelia Sollfrank"

References:

“Female Extension” New Media Art by Mark Tribe/ Reena Jana

http://www.artwarez.org/femext/content/femextEN.html

http://www.artwarez.org/femext/content/publicEN.html

http://www.artwarez.org/femext/content/interviewEN.html

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