Cyberfeminist artist, Cornelia Sollfrank, entered the first ever Hamburg Museum of Art's Gallery of Contemporary Art's international net art competition in 1997. This contest, unlike others before it, stated that only truly web based art and not other medias displayed through the internet would be considered. The first museum of its kind to hold such an event, it was suprised to receive 280 contestants. Unbeknownst to the judges, over seventy percent of the applicants were web programs created by Sollfrank. She created a program known as Female Extension that made up various women, from different backgrounds and styles that were backed by legitimate e-mail addresses. Additionally, these "women" also had separate entries. Basically, they were a part of her entry, but had their own lives so to speak. These works took HTML information and played with it in a way that they resembled other pieces. After the winners were announced, she came out with what she had done. All three of the winners were male, which Sollfrank had predicted. Her work was meant to criticize the blatant sexism of the system. Miraculously, even though over half of the applicants were female, the men somehow won. I think this was a really interesting way of calling them out. I'm not exactly a feminist, but sometimes its hard to deny that men have it easier in certain situations. She may not have won the prize, but she won in the sense that the judges at the Hamburg Museum can not deny their decisions. Using art to prove a point is really powerful, yet one little slip and the wrong meaning could be conveyed. Sollfrank was intelligent in the way this was planned out.
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