Do you use apple widgets? I don’t but I know I’m about to upgrade my OS – especially now since apple has made available a digital version of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” cards. I’ve had a couple of different versions of these decks and use them in my work from time to time. I think they are really interesting and allow a little bit of thinking room in the creative process.
A Brief History of Oblique Strategies
The Oblique Strategies are a deck of cards. Before the world went digital, they were easy to describe. They measured about 2-3/4″ x 3-3/4″ and came in a small black box which said “OBLIQUE STRATEGIES” on one of the top’s long sides and “BRIAN ENO/PETER SCHMIDT” on the other side. The cards were solid black on one side, and had the Oblique Strategies printed in a 10-point sans serif face on the other
The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schmidt 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 a big buck 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 is not clear from any sources I’ve run across that the cards were intended to be a “single instruction/single response” kind of “game”. The introductory cards included in all three versions of the first 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.
Most of the content from todays post was cribbed from Gregory Taylors website here