These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Of which this is number (your number, circled)
Printed January 1975 in an edition of 500 This is how each of the first three decks labels and describes itself: Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80Īn introduction to the Oblique Strategies can be found in the deck itself. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did we published them as a pack of cards, and they're now used by quite a lot of different people, I think."
We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know.there was a complete correspondence between the messages. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he'd kept those in a notebook. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. I think it was "Was it really a mistake?" which was, of course, much the same kind of message. The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." And, in fact, Peter's first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was.
#BRIAN ENO OBLIQUE STRATEGIES DOC SERIES#
The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."
If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget 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. There were times when we hadn't seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon reemitting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position - which was quite different from the one we'd been in prior to that. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. "These cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It seems clear, also, that the deck was not conceived of as a set of "fixed" instructions, but rather a group of ideas to be added to or modified over time each of the three decks included 4 or 5 blank cards, intended to be filled and used as needed.Įno discusses the Oblique Strategies at greatest length in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian, conducted at KPFA in Berkeley in early 1980: The introductory cards included in all three versions of the first versions of the Oblique Strategies suggest otherwise. It is not clear from any sources whether the cards were explicitly intended to be oracular at the outset - that is, whether or not Peter Schmidt and Eno necessarily saw them exclusively as a "single instruction/single response" kind of "game".
#BRIAN ENO OBLIQUE STRATEGIES DOC FREE#
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. The project consisted of a set of 115 white cards with simple black text in a deck subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. Eno and Schmidt created a series of art instructions titled Oblique Strategies. One of Brian Eno’s most interesting projects is a mid-1970s collaboration with the German composer and painter Peter Schmidt, who had just finished a set of 64 drawings based on the I Ching - the same ancient Chinese text that so inspired John Cage.