Oblique Strategies is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, first published in Physically, it takes the. Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” Deck of Cards () · How Jim Jarmusch Gets Creative Ideas from. Oblique strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas [Brian Eno] on Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck by Michael Michalko Cards $ In Stock.

1. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies
2. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies Cards Pdf Download
3. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies Online
4. Brian Eno Oblique Strategies Pdf

Speaking about the Oblique Strategies to San Francisco-based KPFA radio in 1980, Eno said: “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me forgetting that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. In 1975, Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno created the original pack of Oblique Strategies cards, through thinking about approaches to their own work as artist and musician. The Oblique Strategies constitute a set of over 100 cards, each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations. These famous cards have been used by many artists. Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a deck of 7-by-9-centimetre (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black container box, created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt and first published in 1975. A line has two sides Infinitesimal gradations Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list Into the impossible. Oblique Strategies, originally presented as a pack of cards, were by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each Oblique Strategy is a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a creative deadlock or dilemma situation. This website presents a random Oblique Strategy.

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies

Your comment will be queued in Akismet! But it seems that the very first set of Oblique Strategies, featured in Schneider’s post, is unavailable at any price. Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. Eno, who had known Schmidt since the late s, had been pursuing a similar project himself which he had handwritten onto a number of bamboo cards and given the name “Oblique Strategies” in We’re hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads.

Advertised for sale in the EG Newsletter [13] and elsewhere [14]. References to Oblique Strategies exist in popular culture, notably in the film Slacker[6] srategies which a character offers passers-by cards from a deck. Someday World High Life.

Oblique Strategies

Stategies Read Edit View history. Eno’s decision to revisit the cards and his collaboration with Norton in revising them is described in detail in his book A Year with Swollen Appendices. Individually numbered, and signed by Eno and Schmidt [10].

We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. Having first come on the market in the s, Oblique Strategies has gone through several different production runs, usually packaged in handsome boxes with the deck’s name emblazoned in gold. The set went through three limited edition printings before Schmidt suddenly died in earlyafter which the card decks became rather rare and expensive.

Strategies mentioned include “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”, “Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify”, “Not building a wall; making a brick”, “Repetition is a form of change”, and one which came to be seen as a summary of the film’s ethos though it was not part of the official set of Oblique Strategies”Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.

A few are pblique to music composition; others are more general. Click the Donate button and support Open Culture. Roxy Music For Your Pleasure.

No conclusive evidence has surfaced its existence [17]. These cards obliqud from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing.

Includes all five versions of Oblique Obliqu [25]. Fourth World Volume Two. The total package of Oblique Strategies may have grown more refined over the years, but this handmade first set does have a certain immediacy, and also, in a sense, the imprimatur of history: In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear A limited edition in a burgundy case [22].

Are We Not Men? Back then, writes Dangerous Minds’ Martin Schneiderthe concept for Eno and Schmidt’s “set of cards with elliptical imperatives designed to spark in the user creative connections unobtainable through regular modes of work” emerged as a form of “radical intervention with roots in Eastern philosophy. Available through Eno’s bran label at the time, Opal Records [11] [12].

Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect intellect catching up with intuitionsometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. Stories suggest they were used during the recording of instrumentals on “Heroes” such as ” Sense of Doubt ” and were used more extensively on Lodger ” Fantastic Voyage “, ” Boys Keep Swinging “, “Red Money”.

Processing programming language version. Open-source plugin by David Wicks [26] for the Processing creative coding environment.

Oblique Strategies

By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. And when my students get a mental block, I immediately direct them to that wall. The Plateaux of Mirror The Pearl.

Leave a Reply Name required Email required Message. It also began as thoroughly a physical experience, invented by producer-artist-ambient musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt, who first came up with them in the pre-digital days of Other musicians inspired by Oblique Strategies include the British band Coldplaysaid to have used the cards when recording their Brian Eno -produced album Viva la Vida or Bria and All His Stdategies and French band Phoenixwho used the cards when recording their album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

“If a thing can be said, it can be said simply.”

By Maria Popova

“Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences,” ambient music pioneer Brian Enowrote in his diary. It is precisely this ethos that explains Eno’s medium-blind, experience-centric creative impulse underpinning the visual arts career that he undertook in the 1960s, which developed in tandem with his growth as a musician. That is precisely what Christopher Scoates, director of the University Art Museum at California State University, explores with unprecedented depth and dimension in Brian Eno: Visual Music (public library) — a magnificent monograph spanning more than four decades of Eno’s music projects and museum and gallery installations, contextualized amidst a wealth of exhibition notes, sketchbook pages, and other never-before-revealed archival materials.

In a 2005 interview for the British Arts Council, Eno came to compare his work to that of John Cage:

John Cage … made a choice at a certain point: he chose not to interfere with the music content anymore. But the approach I have chosen was different from his. I don’t reject interference; I choose to interfere and guide. . . . The music systems designed by Cage are choice-free, he doesn’t filter what comes out of his mind; people have to accept them passively. But my approach is, although I don’t interfere with the completion of a system, if the end result is not good, I’ll ditch it and do something else. This is a fundamental difference between Cage and me. If you consider yourself to be an experimental musician, you’ll have to accept that some of your experiments will fail. Though the failed works might be interesting too, they are not works that you would choose to share with other people or publish.

Indeed, one of Eno’s most interesting projects is a mid-1970s collaboration with the German composer Peter Schmidt, who had just finished a set of 64 drawings based on the I Ching — the same ancient Chinese text that so inspired Cage. Eno and Schmidt created a series of art instructions — an underappreciated art genre unto itself — titled Oblique Strategies. The project consisted of a set of 115 white cards with simple black text in a deck subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. Though a conceptual art project, the cards were essentially a practical tool for generating ideas, breaking through creative block, and breaking free of stale thought patterns.

Eno even employed the cards while producing David Bowie’s iconic 1977 album Heroes, using Oblique Strategies on the song “Sense of Doubt.”

Eno first confronted this interweaving of music and visual art in his formal arts education, amidst the groundswell of the avant-garde and the Fluxus movement with its bold proclamation that “anything can be art and anyone can do it.” He empathically embraced this inclusive model of creativity in defiance to the specializations and constraints of the traditional art world, asserting:

Art schools manage to balance themselves on the fence between telling you what to do step by step, and leaving you free to do what you want. Their orientation is basically towards the production of specialists, and towards the provision of ambitions, of goals, and identities. The assumption of the correct identity — painter, sculptor — fattens you up for the market. The identity becomes a straightjacket; it becomes progressively more dangerous to step outside of it.

In the foreword, legendary British artist, theorist, and cybernetics pioneer Roy Ascott, who was once Eno’s teacher, attempts to map where Eno belongs in the ecosystem of art:

Any attempt to locate Brian Eno’s work within an historical framework calls for a triple triangulation, whose trig points in the English tradition would seem to be Turner/Elgar/Blake; in Europe, Matisse/Satie/ Bergson, and in the United States Rothko/La Monte Young/Rorty. This triple triangulation will quickly be seen as insufficient, however, since those based on Asian and Middle Eastern cultures will also be required. Soon it would become apparent that a precise or consistent location cannot be determined, except by the abandonment of triangulation in favor of a dynamic network model. Here we would need to adopt second-order cybernetics, the recognition that attempting to measure cultural location is relative, viewer dependent, unstable, shifting, and open-ended. This conclusion reminds me that Brian was the first of my students to understand that cybernetics is philosophy, and that philosophy is cybernetics.

However, this approach to an understanding of Eno’s art would in itself fail to recognize his aesthetic of surrender and meditation, in which respect he seems to adopt a kind of Duchampian indifference, flowing from a process of removal of the Self from reflection, toward a quiet celebration of uneventfulness.

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies Cards Pdf Download

But Eno’s greatest accomplishment — and what makes his visual art so singular yet so widely resonant and important — is arguably his exploration of identity. Amidst a cultural landscape where the creative self is necessarily divided, Eno has consistently conquered a wide array of creative and intellectual fields while at the same time mastering the art of integration. Ascott puts it beautifully:

We cannot grasp the ambient identity of Eno’s artwork without also recognizing the ambient identity of the artist himself. This demands knowing not only where to place him in the spectrum of roles across philosophy, visual arts, performance, music, social and cultural commentary, and activism, but in terms of personae, or as we say now, avatars. . . . Throughout his career, not only has Eno explored identity, he has provided the context, employing light, sound, space, and color, in which each participant can playfully and passionately share in the breaching of the boundaries of the Self.

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies Online

Brian Eno: Visual Music is beautiful and compelling in its entirety. Complement it with the psychology of getting unstuck and some of today’s most celebrated writers, artists, and designers on how to break through your creative block.

Brian Eno Oblique Strategies Pdf

Images courtesy of Chronicle Books