Cornelia Sollfrank

The Beautiful Warriors: Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century brings together seven current technofeminist positions from the fields of art and activism. In very different ways, they expand the theories and practices of 1990's cyberfeminism and thus react to new forms of discrimination and exploitation. Gender politics are negotiated with reference to technology, and questions of technology are combined with questions of ecology and economy. The different positions around this new techno-eco-feminism understand their practice as an invitation to take up their social and aesthetic interventions, to join in, to continue, and never give up. Contributions from Christina Grammatikopoulou, Isabel de Sena, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Spideralex, Sophie Toupin, hvale vale, Yvonne Volkart.

Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century

The Beautiful Warriors

Felix Stalder

Shusha Niederberger

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects--drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital--that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool--in other words, the book's interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

Aesthetics of the Commons

The German artist, hacker and "cyberfeminist" Cornelia Sollfrank gained notoriety with her Net.Art Generator (www.obn.org/generator), which allows users to enter a few keystrokes and create a work of art. Sollfrank's real goal is to challenge the concept of authorship in an age where appropriation is as common as the click of a mouse, and this monograph provides a detailed discussion of one of the Net's pioneering artist/theorists.

Cornelia Sollfrank

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