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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.