Female extention

Door: Cornelia Sollfrank.

“In early 1997, Sollfrank received a fax announcing the call for entries for Extension, a new prize for net art organized by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in partnership with Der Spiegel. She saw the prize as an attempt to co-opt the energy of the net art scene and impose the museum’s standards on it.

In an effort to highlight the prize’s shortcomings, Sollfrank created 289 fake identities, all of them women, using names and addresses lifted from international phone books. She had to create individual email addresses for each, which in 1997 was not easy; to accomplish this, she relied on her contacts at important hubs of 1990s net culture such as The Thing and Ljudmila, which managed their own mail servers.”

aldus rhizome.net.