Internet Art: Chapter 2

           The first influence on the internet art world that I chose to highlight from this chapter is Cornelia Solfrank.  The book shows a piece that she created with a team titled "Female Extension," a feminist reaction to an internet art competition in 1997.  From this alone I knew that she was an artist I wanted to look into.  Her art is not merely for entertainment or visual aesthetics, but to get her voice out to the public while standing up for something she believes in.  Solfrank originally studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and then Fine art at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg.  In addition to her life as a  post media conceptual artist, she has also taught at a multitude of universities and written a great deal on certain issues and their relationships to the internet and media.  Solfrank's specialty lies in authorship and experimenting with different forms of geniality and originality, and her last known work was a research study in the field of intellectual property.
             The second influential internet artist I chose to research was Yael Kanarek. I did this based off of the description of her piece titled "World of Awe."  In the book it states that this piece, "…mixes colorful, clean, well-executed futuristic landscapes with love letters full of imagined visual propositions and cyborg characters."  This alone had me interested in her and her art, and after some research, she turned out to be quite interesting.  Yael was born in New York City, raised in Israel, and then returned to New York in '91 to begin to live out her dream.  She became extremely active in the Net Art scene from it's beginning, which proves just how influential she really is, and she had worked with Eyebeam for over ten years.  She has been working on and improving "World of Awe" since 1995, and it is a piece that combines storytelling, traveling, memory, and technology.  Yael has been awarding both in the United States and abroad for her work, she has been featured in many museums, and has received grants from multiple foundations.  She is truly a Wonder Woman in the internet art world.