Matt Mehlan – Artist Pool

Artist Pool – an experiment in building an open-source organizational model, web platform, and integrated set of tools for artists and arts organizations. It’s becoming common knowledge that the traditional models of publishing and distributing media, music, video, and writing have been upended by digital media and the Internet, which – beyond the mechanisms of selling, marketing, copying, and sharing – also constitutes an entirely new hybrid medium. Artist Pool intends to build a hybrid model for presenting this kind hybrid of work on the web, focused first and foremost on building an infrastructure that puts artists, and the art, first.

Artist Pool will commission work and collate material to be presented, sold or monetized, and archived on the web, offer bi-monthly releases & newsletter, a subscription service for all digital content, short-run physical editions, and a long-term searchable web archive of artwork/media made for the web.

Artist Pool will act as an artist service to produce, distribute, and market work curated and maintained by artists and organizations involved – a pooling of energy and resources already being put into their individual/organizational practices. Artist Pool will create opportunities for artists to invest in themselves, understand the systems, risks, and rewards associated with the release of their work, and remove the exploitative business methods of content-farms, record labels, and web meta-businesses. Artist Pool will support the work of artists without demanding they give up the rights to their work, and offer services for long-term digital distribution, across commercial and non-commercial platforms, for artists who want their work accessible to the public without being forced to give it away for free.

Matt Mehlan is a Chicagoland native, artist, musician, and arts organizer. Based in Brooklyn for the last 10 years, Matt fronts the band Skeletons, the multimedia project Uumans, and runs the record label Shinkoyo. He co-founded the original Silent Barn art space in NYC, and worked for nine years as Production Manager at the experimental music institution Roulette, where he produced concerts, managed the archive, and made documentaries about musicians and artists for Roulette TV.

Matt has performed around the world and released music on Shinkoyo, Ghostly International, Tomlab, Crammed Discs, The Social Registry, Sockets, Altin Village and Mine, among other labels.