Mondrian’s Window (1998): The very first 1/1 NFT from the archive, uniquely paired with a one-of-a-kind hand-colored physical masterpiece.

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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. 

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 as the digital world took shape. Between algorithm and memory,the work of pioneering digital artist Martine Jacobs remains relevant today precisely because 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.

Description:

Created in 1998, Mondrian Meets Modigliani is a bold digital artwork by Martine Jacobs — a sensual, conceptual fusion of two distinct artistic worlds. Using early-generation software and a Pentium II computer, Martine experimented with large-scale classical artworks found on the internet, reimagining them through the lens of digital abstraction.

The central figure — a reclining nude reminiscent of Modigliani’s elongated sensuality — is framed and fractured by a rigid Mondrian grid. Primary color blocks and black lines slice through the softness of the human form, creating a visual tension between desire and design, emotion and order. The result is both intimate and analytical: a nude caught in a modernist cage, yet still radiating warmth and vulnerability.

For Martine, this digital collage was a thrilling experiment. At a time when few artists dared to remix canonical art through digital means, she embraced the internet as a source of inspiration and transformation. The juxtaposition of Modigliani’s emotional realism with Mondrian’s geometric purity became a metaphor for the duality of feminine expression — sensual yet structured, timeless yet pixelated.

This work stands as a landmark in Martine’s digital legacy: a moment when the screen became a canvas, and the archive became a playground for poetic resistance.

Cansu waldron :  A questions of visibility and control surface more sharply in Mondrian’s Window. A nude woman appears through glitch-like blocks of red, yellow, and blue, evoking both modernist abstraction and early digital surveillance. The figure is visible yet fragmented, framed yet constrained. Here, vulnerability becomes political, exposing the tension between self-expression and observation, and asking when digital visibility empowers women and when it simply renders them watchable. 

Provenance video   documenting the creation, history, and authenticity of Mondriaan’s Window (1998) by Martine Jacobs.