Today, I updated the www.musterproject.com page to reflect long-brewing change to this site and to project muster.

From the very beginning, the structural concern of the project has been how to orchestrate low-maintenance systems that have a real-world effect on interpellative practices and human interactions in the context of talking about and relating to artists. In other words, the point from a managerial view is that no matter how humble, the thing you strive to set up should be ongoing.

The challenge for me over the past three years of working on this idea has been the administrative load, which include things such as finding and managing volunteer interviewers for the magazine, editing and posting transcripts, video snippets and audio podcasts of artist interviews, while trying to figure out where the project is supposed to be heading and subsequently nudging it in one direction or another.

Insofar all of this is a pretty serious part of my own current studio practice, one of my quandries has been how to simultaneously foster an open-ended, unbounded aesthetic space while defining some kinds of objects and/or experiences that can be closed off and isolated as members of the set [things that project muster produces].

Really, the question isn't about collateralized cultural production as much as it is about benchmarking the ongoing practice.

This, of course, is a long prelude to saying that from now on, things are going to be a little different. Here's how:

I'm going to be working pretty heavily on web-directed tools that will both power sections of the project muster site, and also to be released under GPL as open-source software packages.

The software projects listed at the front page are each being created to service interpellative investigations. As they're finished, I'll incorporate them into the site's architecture and open new areas of www.musterproject.com

As we get moving, I'll resurrect all the content for www.mustermagazine.com and incorporate it into a new model that gathers existing interview documents and texts as much as it hopes to foster new, original interviews. www.mustermagazine.com will also feature documents from the project as a whole, not just artist interviews.

Those other parts of the project will include a taxonomy software project I've been working on as well as a bartering engine.

Hopefully, the whole thing will in part be facilitated by two other software projects that address some of the missing pieces in common online social spaces.

Yes, it's a whole lot to bite off, but it's also a finite list and has discrete deliverables (that's a good thing).

I'm very much interested in whether there are programmers or artists who'd like to work on this. Experience with Python is necessary on the programming end, though trialing and beta-type input from artists only requires a little patience & generosity.

Please contact me directly if you'd like to know more. matt AT mattfisherstudio DOT com.

willworkforart.com is a DIY barter market for art, and will have four areas that you can post in:

• art for stuff
• art for services
• stuff for art
• services for art

The terms of use will have disclaimers and whatnot, and I'm trying to figure out what I/you should know about taxes and laws related to bartering.

So far, here are the bullets, and below are a couple links to things I'm finding helpful:

• The gov't sees barter as a two-part cash sale
• i.e. it's as if there was an exchange of cash as the agreed value of the barter
• i.e. you will owe both sales tax and income tax on the value of the barter
• If you barter for art/studio supplies, you can write off the value off the value of the barter, but you'll still owe sales tax on it

Links:
http://www.artbusiness.com/barter.html

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1110202467520

The Business of Being an Artist, by Daniel Grant at Google Book Search

I've moved the site to an upgraded Plone version (3.1.7). Lots of the existing images and articles were wrapped in modules for the old version that weren't compatible with the new, so I've archived them and will be adding them back to the site bit by bit over the next couple weeks. If you need immediate access to your interview, please let me know & I'll send you some files.

Also underway are pretty significant changes to the structure and aims of project muster & the magazine.

The overall strategic thrust of project muster will remain the same-- shed light on the ways that language and conventions shape how artists view themselves and their practice-- though the tactics are about to change.

It's a pretty ominous time for starting a new publishing project and I'm freelancing full-time now, with fewer untethered resources for managing the editorial end of a startup print zine. All that adds up to a needed shift in the project, hopefully, in the long run, for the better.

Heyartistgetinterviewed.com will be back up pretty soon, with a new direction. I'm going to be spending my focus on helping to match up artists and interviewers, and will be spending less time transcribing, editing, and posting the results of those interviews. HAGI.com will be reassembled to act as a service for both artists and journalists to find each other.

Mustermagazine.com will be back up soon, too. We'll continue to present original interviews with artists and will be reblogging interviews from around the web.

And, there are some new things I'm working on that I won't jinx by talking about until they're ready.

Freshly relaunched.

Changes to the project will be posted here.