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I'm Alejandra Russi, and this is the Russi Hive.
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Conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice.
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As we enter 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 form.
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Next up, the Thursday Machine, a teeny tiny dispatch on the anticlimax of launching, repetition and pattern as working method, and the alarm bell that rings when a working structure starts feeling a little too settled.
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This podcast is presented by Ricco/ Maresca.
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So what happens when something you've been working on tirelessly for months is finally released into the world?
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Nothing much.
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The strange and slightly disturbing thing about being trapped in your own head is that everything happening in there feels like a matter of cosmic significance.
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Meanwhile, everyone else is just living their life, treating whatever is happening in theirs as equally consequential.
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And that's actually part of the point.
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We all carry worlds inside of us.
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Or to borrow the language of my new meditation practice, we create the world from within a particular field of consciousness.
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That's basically the crux of my interviews.
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I want to get beyond the Q&A information exchange and become a witness to how someone else makes sense of their experience and then turns that understanding into a creative practice.
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But I feel like I've said variations of this ad nauseum.
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Like every time I get in front of a camera alone, so I will stop.
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What also happens when you launch a project that promises to publish something every two weeks is that you now have to publish something every two weeks.
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Every other Thursday arrives with absolutely no regard for whether I am inspired, exhausted, underprepared, overprepared, questioning every decision I've ever made, or suddenly convinced that podcasting itself may actually be a terrible cultural phenomenon.
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So while putting anything new out into the world usually requires a huge psychological leap, keeping it alive requires something much less dramatic and in many ways harder.
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Repetition.
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What does repetition do to a creative project?
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It gives it rhythm, it exposes its weaknesses, it creates new habits, it turns certain decisions into instinct, it makes the thing less precious, it occasionally makes you hate the thing, it creates systems, rituals, shortcuts, it makes you weirdly emotional about Thursdays, and somewhere along the way, it turns something you are trying to make into something you simply do.
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So let's unravel just the rhythm part.
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Because this is where my gallery job became unexpectedly useful as an operational system.
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As media director at Ricco/ Maresca, I think of exhibition promotion as a kind of downstream process.
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The opening reception is a fixed uh point on the calendar, the thing everything else is moving toward.
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But because it's fixed, you work backward from it to figure out everything that needs to happen first.
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So technically, I guess you start downstream and you work your way upstream.
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Now I'm confused.
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Just kidding.
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I am very seldom confused.
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With the podcast, it's uh slightly different.
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Once I have the raw footage in the bag, or to be more precise, a very large SSD drive, I put the episode into a production pipeline.
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The launch date is the equivalent of the exhibition opening.
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Then comes video editing, which is a pretty big job.
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I had some help in season one, but brave soul that I am, I am actually doing it myself in season two.
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There's this wonderful thing called a multicam clip.
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Camera one, camera two, camera three all synced together with the individual audio channels.
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Then you're just like cut, cut, cut angle A, angle B, angle C, you're like stitching reality back together.
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Or at least the very limited reality of one podcast episode.
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Let's skip the uploading process because that's boring.
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The episode publishes automatically at 8 a.m.
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Then I send an email blast to the gallery's mailing list with the copy and all the relevant links, which ideally I have prepared a couple of days in advance like a responsible adult.
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The day before I announce the episode on Instagram with what I call a Sharpie video.
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RIP, the Sharpie video, actually.
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Season two is getting a punchier announcement, so stay tuned.
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Then come the Instagram posts.
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And yes, I do know I promised TikTok.
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That's also a season two project because I need to enter the TikTok state of mind.
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And apparently that takes a little longer if you're a millennial.
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So let's get back to the Instagram grid for just a moment.
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Let me just go there for a second.
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Even just the visual cadence of this grid is deeply soothing to my brain.
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The way the colors move in these predictable patterns.
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Anyway, it helps if you get pleasure from that sort of thing.
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But how do you know when the rhythm that keeps a creative project alive starts to prevent it from changing?
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I think you know when you get a little too comfortable, when you start autopiloting your way through certain decisions, when the structure that once helped you move starts kind of hardening into a template.
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I don't think I'm there yet.
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But the question knocking at my door is, what do you deliberately disrupt before the formula starts dictating the project?
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That's where we will pick up next week.
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If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack @russihive. If someone came to mind for The Hive, send guest suggestions to guests at russihive.com.
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And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at russihive.com.
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Original music and sonic identity for the Russi Hive by Ant food.
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Until next time, let your life be a creative act.