“Soft Mobility Abstracts” is a project by the artist Kari Altmann, commissioned by First Look. Much like her past works, “Soft Mobility Abstracts” takes the shape of expansive and evolving teams of media. Bound by sets of tags, images and videos unfold across interrelated social media, as well as leak into physical installations, whose documentation is often recycled back into new online projects. Aiming to operate more like open fields of visual culture than discreet art objects, her work eschews formal limits and, instead, dilates around themes including biopolitics, feminism, and posthumanism.

For “Soft Mobility Abstracts,” the associated tags include #jailbreakgesture, #softmobility, #vitalcontent, and #credit—a list that describes an interest in networked survivalism, which Altmann has explored through previous projects including “R U In?S” (2009–ongoing). Here, a preoccupation with alternative currency mashes with open-sourced weapons and found foods to explore how a current survivalist fantasy can be fetishized into a visual brand. Throughout its premiere month, and after, “Soft Mobility Abstracts” developed through a stream of media that begins with the launch of the project, and included handheld “phonecam” videos capturing performances, as well as found or sourced material.¹

“Soft Mobility Abstracts” can be viewed on the following platforms: Instagram: @softmobility; Vine: @softmobility; Tumblr: softmobility.tumblr.com

Established in 2012 and co-organized by the New Museum and Rhizome, First Look is a digital art commissioning and exhibition program representing the breadth of art online—from interactive documentary, to custom-built participatory applications, to moving image-based works, and art for mobile VR. Encompassing a substantial array of work that continues to expand, First Look explores the formal, social, and aesthetic possibilities of emerging technologies on the web.