A deck of cards first published in 1975 for stimulating the mind during composition of music. The deck had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt, a British painter used the same technique informally. They each used hand made cards to break a 'stuck point' and continue moving on a given work. These desks of cards tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure - either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you're running up an expensive studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind.
It's not clear from any other sources I've so far run across 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"). The introductory cards included in all three versions of the Oblique Strategies suggest otherwise. 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.
Here are the cards themselves:
- Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities
- Don't be frightened of cliches
- What is the reality of the situation?
- Are there sections? Consider transitions
- Turn it upside down
- Think of the radio
- Allow an easement (an easement is the abandonment of a stricture)
- Simple subtraction
- Go slowly all the way round the outside
- A line has two sides
- Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list
- Into the impossible
- Ask people to work against their better judgement
- Take away the elements in order of apparent non-importance
- Infinitesimal gradations
- Change instrument roles
- Accretion
- Disconnect from desire
- Emphasize repetitions
- Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do
- Don't be frightened to display your talents
- Breathe more deeply
- Honor thy error as a hidden intention
- Only one element of each kind
- Is there something missing?
- Use `unqualified' people
- How would you have done it?
- Emphasize differences
- Do nothing for as long as possible
- Bridges -build -burn
- You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas
- Tidy up
- Do the words need changing?
- Ask your body
- Water
- Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
- Consult other sources -promising -unpromising
- Use an unacceptable color
- Humanize something free of error
- Use filters
- Fill every beat with something
- Discard an axiom
- What wouldn't you do?
- Decorate, decorate
- Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle
- Listen to the quiet voice
- Is it finished?
- Put in earplugs
- Give the game away
- Abandon normal instruments
- Use fewer notes
- Repetition is a form of change
- Give way to your worst impulse
- Reverse
- Trust in the you of now
- What would your closest friend do?
- Distorting time
- Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame
- blank white card
- Ghost echoes
- You can only make one dot at a time
- Just carry on
- (Organic) machinery
- The inconsistency principle
- Don't break the silence
- Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them
- Cascades
- Courage!
- What mistakes did you make last time?
- Consider different fading systems
- Mute and continue
- It is quite possible (after all)
- Don't stress one thing more than another
- You are an engineer
- Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics
- Look at the order in which you do things
- Go outside. Shut the door.
- Do we need holes?
- Cluster analysis
- Do something boring
- Define an area as `safe' and use it as an anchor
- Overtly resist change
- Accept advice
- Work at a different speed
- Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them
- Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic
- Emphasize the flaws
- Remember .those quiet evenings
- Take a break
- Short circuit (example; a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)
- Use an old idea
- Destroy -nothing -the most important thing
- Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency
- The tape is now the music
Related nodes:
Sources:
http://www.nashville.net/~bryrock/eno/oblique.html
http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/
http://pinche.net/eno/
Last Updated 02.25.03