Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt after thinking about approaches to their own work as artist and musician. Each card presents a question, dilemma, or new way of attacking the work you are doing as an artist. By drawing a card, you are given the chance to rethink your process.
Sample cards include:
- Don’t avoid what is easy.
- Humanize something that is free of error.
- What do you do? Now, what do you do best?
- Do the last thing first.
- Use an unacceptable colour.
On a fan site devoted to the cards, Brian Eno is quoted as saying:
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. 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 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.”
You can purchase the deck from Brian Eno’s site, but if you are as avid a Twitter user as I am, I recommend following Oblique Chirps. One of the cards’ text is randomly tweeted on the hour, which gives you many unexpected (and often much-needed) opportunities to re-evaluate your own creative process.
Update:
kfwinona mentions in the comments that Brian Eno himself is now Twittering and most of his updates are Oblique Strategies. Awesome!
Update 2:
Kim, in the comments, says there’s an Oblique Strategies Dashboard Widget for Mac users, and on a whim I just searched Apple’s App Store for “oblique” and there is also an iPhone/iPod Touch app available.
Byran Eno now also twitters and some of his posts (I hate the word “tweets”) are Oblique Strategies: http://twitter.com/Brian_Eno
For the Mac users out there, there’s also a Dashboard Widget of the cards - just click it to flip it over and get a random strategy. I downloaded it ages ago, but I assume it’s still available on the standard Mac widget site.
I also made a web version a long time ago… Might be useful to some:
http://minimaldesign.net/os/
Awesome, thanks
I’ve found these cards to be quite helpful when ideas aren’t always apparent. I have the app my iPod touch.
There is also free app for ipod touch/iphone as well. Just search for “oblique strategies” in the itunes store.