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I'm Alejandra Rusi, and this is the Rusi Hive.
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Conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice.
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As we drift through the late summer haze, I'm wrapping season one with a trilogy of shorter solo episodes about the podcast itself.
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The spark, the launch, and the living creature finding its next shape.
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Next up, The Restless Born, a dispatch on unfixing the format, asking what happens when a filmed podcast uses video as more than documentation, and the point of view that lets range stay wild without becoming random.
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This podcast is presented by Rico Moresca.
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Welcome to Creative Dispatch No.
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3, the last in my late summer trilogy.
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Behind me are three works by Hideon, one of my very early guests on the podcast.
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And their whole world-building energy feels especially right for what I want to talk about today.
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Last week, I left one question hanging.
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What do you intentionally shake up before the structure starts deciding what the project is?
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Obviously, the answer looks very different depending on what you're making.
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You disrupt a novel differently than you disrupt a restaurant, a painting practice, or a career in ballet.
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But one more general way to think of it could be what conditions around the work can you play around with and stop treating as gibbons?
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You could change the material you're pulling from, the stuff you read, listen to, look at, the well of inspiration, in other words.
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You could bend the perceived constraints, change the context, reconsider the method, change the pace, or even your own role inside it.
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I think changing one condition around the work at a time can be an effective method of disruption.
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You don't have to go poking at the thing from every direction.
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Just shift one variable and see what happens.
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For example, I recently embarked on a morning music listening curriculum of sorts as part of my writing practice.
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And the insight and clarity I've gotten from it have been almost mind-blowing.
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Then obviously, when you try to explain how Thelonius Monk, Philip Glass, Johann Sebastian Bach, Dmitry Shostakovich, and next week Bjork are helping you define the narrative intelligence of your non existent novel, don't.
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Just keep it to yourself, Ali.
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So what can a filmed podcast
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do?
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I've been thinking a lot about this, and the most basic answer is much more than simply showing us the people who are talking.
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You know, the medium does often seem underused.
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A filmed podcast can play with space, staging, objects, sequence, performance.
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It can change who or what is sitting across from you.
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It can change the balance of power between interviewer and interviewee.
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It can even mess with something as basic as the assumption that the question has to come before the answer.
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Season two, for example, opens with an interview in which voice, body, authorship, and presence refuse to line up in the usual way.
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It's the first in a new genre I've invented, and for now remain the world's leading authority on the Hive Construct.
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Two weeks later, you'll find me conducting a very prim and proper artist interview.
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I don't want experimentation itself to become the new formula.
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I want you to genuinely not know what kind of encounter you're going to witness every two weeks.
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What I'm after is range and a little unpredictability.
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And I think that's true of me, well beyond this podcast.
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What I want in life, in work, and the things I'm interested in is range.
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I've never been the person who only likes one genre of anything, or one way of dressing, or one flavor of ice cream sitting politely by itself in a boring scoop.
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I want two or three flavors, and they can touch.
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I want toppings, I want crunch, I want the whipped cream in that perfect spiral, and don't even get me started about the cherry on top.
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I once had a dream that I lived in a house that transformed gradually over the course of the day from a Renaissance palace into a high-rise, ultra modern apartment.
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So I would wake up, say, in the 16th century and go to sleep in the year 2085.
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And I remember waking up and thinking, yes, exactly, that's how I would like it.
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I love ritual and even routine.
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I clearly enjoy a system, but I hate a box.
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So if your interests range across all these different worlds, what keeps that spectrum from becoming completely random?
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And this is where the resonance knob in me would like to stand up and announce that I have taste.
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But hold on.
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If you remove the ego from that equation, all I really mean is that I have a specific sensibility with its own internal logic.
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I'm not here to declare anything about good taste or bad taste.
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I think that's a landmine, so let me get away from that.
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Range only becomes coherent when there's a point of view strong enough to hold it together.
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So that's where I'll leave that.
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Season two of the Rusi Hive is where I start considering and hopefully testing all of these things.
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And Rico Maresca continues to function as much more than a backdrop.
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It's my creative collaborator, a hive before the hive.
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The gallery has this unusual gravitational pull.
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People from very different worlds enter it, collide with one another, disappear, reappear.
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That constellation gives me a lot to work with.
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And more importantly, a lot to keep discovering.
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So I think I've said enough for now.
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See you in two weeks.
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If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at ruseyhive.com.
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And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at rusihive.com.
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Original music and sonic identity for the Rusi Hive by Ant Food.
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Until next time, let your life be a creative act.