Curatorial Introduction for Martine Jacobs’ Foundational 1998 Collection by Cansu Waldron 

Martine Jacobs’ digital practice emerges from a moment before the language, market, or institutional frameworks for “digital art” existed. 

Her archive of more than 350 works created between 1998 and 2007 is one of the most emotional and overlooked bodies of early internet art — a record of how people were feeling online as the digital world was taking shape. 

What makes the Foundational 1998 Collection so relevant today is that it does not follow the dominant digital art narrative of its time. 

Instead, it presents a deeply personal feminist intervention into the early web. While much early net art focused on code, conceptualism, or software aesthetics, Jacobs turned toward protest, spirituality, desire, grief, and the intimate emotional lives of women. 

She was building a visual language for feeling at a moment when the internet had not yet learned how to hold emotion, insisting that vulnerability was not a weakness in the digital realm, but a form of authorship.

 This positioning places Jacobs within a parallel lineage of feminist digital practice that has yet to be fully historicized. 

Long before the language of digital identity, collective storytelling, or Web3 community emerged, she was already using the internet as an emotional commons — a space where shared vulnerability became a source of connection and quiet power. 

For this reason, her archive is not only relevant to institutions such as The Feminist Institute, but essential to understanding the roots of contemporary female-focused digital communities, including World of Women.

 Jacobs’ entry into digital art began in 1998, when access to a Pentium II computer and early versions of Adobe and Paint Shop Pro offered what she describes as “complete liberation.” Classically trained in charcoal and pastel, she immediately recognized the potential of digital manipulation — its capacity to layer, distort, and reimagine images with unprecedented speed. 

While peers dismissed the computer as cold or inauthentic, Jacobs approached it as a site of intimacy, infusing digital images with the warmth of her analog sensibility. 

This blend of emotional vulnerability and resilience defines Jacobs’ archive, where intimacy, grief, and spiritual searching converge into a radical assertion of feminine agency. 

Her work treats the early internet as a space for shared emotion, where sorrow, empathy, and reflection could exist openly and collectively. 

At a time when traditional media struggled to convey largescale grief, her digital portals drew over 100,000 visitors, creating an early, horizontal emotional commons. 

Across the archive, Jacobs shows that vulnerability is not weakness but a form of authorship, and that feminine strength need not be restrained by fear, societal expectation, or technological limits. 

Her practice anticipates contemporary movements reclaiming myth, identity, and power, demonstrating that the emotional, political, and spiritual stakes of digital art are inseparable from its medium. 

All of these works gain new meaning now that the archive has been formally preserved by the Internet Archive. 

After years of risking disappearance through obsolete interfaces, expired software, and browser constraints, this recognition marks a turning point — establishing Jacobs’ practice not only as digital art, but as a historical record of digital emotion. 

This is the significance of Martine Jacobs’ archive: it reveals the emotional, feminist, and political roots that continue to shape digital art today. It shows that one of the most important stories of the early web was happening outside the mainstream narrative, created by a woman using digital tools to map the inner landscapes of a world in transition.

Lonely Buddha (1998)

Digital composition / Spiritual solitude / Chromatic meditation

Lonely Buddha is a digitally composed artwork created in 1998 using Paint Shop Pro on a Pentium II system. A stylized Buddha figure sits in meditative stillness, eyes closed, one hand raised in a gentle mudra. The background radiates with blue and orange hues — a chromatic aura that evokes both inner peace and emotional intensity. The figure appears isolated, luminous, and contemplative, suspended in a digital space that feels both sacred and melancholic.

This piece belongs to Martine Jacobs’ Spiritual Signalworks and Emotional Surrealworks constellations, where spiritual icons are rendered as solitary transmitters of calm, resistance, and reflection. Lonely Buddha is not just a meditation image — it is a digital relic of emotional endurance, created in a pre-platform era when spiritual art was coded pixel by pixel. The work speaks to the tension between serenity and isolation, presence and absence, devotion and longing.

Cansu Waldron:   “Spiritual searching flows throughout the archive, shaped by a childhood marked by silence and later journeys through India and Nepal. Many pieces wrestle with the question: Where does empathy go when power fails? Lonely Buddha reflects this inward gaze, presenting stillness as endurance rather than escape. ”