The 3rd Distinguished Lecture organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) is given by the pioneering net.artist and feminist activist Cornelia Sollfrank.
 

• Time: Friday, November 7, 14.15-16.00
• Location: AIAS Auditorium, Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B (map), Building 1630.

DARC is thrilled to invite you to this lecture by artist, organiser, and writer Cornelia Sollfrank. Sollfrank’s long career since the 1990s has encompassed pioneering artistic projects with a strong feminist angle and she has been a core member in the fields of net and software art with a significant impact in how we critically approach digital culture. Sollfrank has just in 2025 received the prestigious  HAP Grieshaber Prize of VG Bild-Kunst and is the co-author of the recent book  Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices. Find below the abstract of her talk, “100 Years of net.art and Cyberfeminism”. 

The previous DARC distinguished lectures were given by artist Olia Lialina and theorist Matthew Fuller.

The talk is followed by a reception at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS). The talk is organised and supported by DARC, the School of Communication and Culture, the Cultures and Practices of Digital Technologies -program, as well as AIAS. For further queries, contact professor Jussi Parikka (parikka@cc.au.dk).

The event is free but please register at:
https://event.au.dk/events/darc-s-distinguished-lecture-by-cornelia-sollfrank

100 Years of net art and Cyberfeminism

Cornelia Sollfrank (PhD)

This lecture revisits early net art and cyberfeminism of the 1990s, tracing their experimentation with digital media and their critique of (gendered) power structures within technology. Net art’s embrace of institutional critique, networked circulation, and the aesthetics of code and interactivity anticipated many of today’s artistic and political practices, while cyberfeminism challenged the masculinist mythologies of cyberspace and envisioned new modes of embodiment, identity, and resistance online. 

From today's perspective, the visions associated with this appear both prophetic and limited: prophetic in their recognition that digital networks are contested places of power and creativity, but limited by the optimism surrounding the emerging Internet. In recent decades the internet has transformed from an experimental playground and shared cultural commons into a sphere increasingly dominated by platform capitalism, surveillance economies, and forms of technological totalitarianism—the concentration of digital power in the hands of corporations and state actors that combine extractive data regimes with authoritarian control, algorithmic governance, and the suppression of dissenting opinions. 

Against this backdrop, questions arise about appropriate forms of resistance and protest and their aesthetic and political positioning. Without providing a ready-made catalog of instructions for action, the lecture is intended as an invitation to discussion, as the beginning of a joint reflection on possible forms of action for which the idea of the digital commons is just as central as fundamental feminist principles.