“Leap of faith” and “galaxy cat gif” (“I <3 cats,” she writes via email), are both comments on the experience of living inside an endless visual archive, and how we process that incessant flood of images, whether silly or serious. Where one minute you’re laughing at a stranger’s cat who happens to have millions of followers, doing something totally inane, immediately sharing it with your friend. Next thing, you’re fed the most disturbing clip you somehow can’t switch off. And so, the loop continues, oscillating between so cute, so cool, so sad.
If ever struggling for inspiration, it is more often vintage corners of the internet, “2010 Tumblr” for instance, that Jakobson will turn to for discovery. “There’s something more genuine and unexpected there, less curated and not optimized for performance,” she says. “I also look to books about new media, digital culture and visual language. I’m drawn to places where the content isn’t trying to sell itself to me, where I have to dig a bit.”