It cries out for more universal release.įirst published in Eye no. This long-overdue reissue was initiated with Eno’s co-operation, as a Christmas present for 4,000 friends and contacts. The fifth edition of the Oblique Strategies is now available You can get your own deck (without impoverishing yourself as an eBay bidder) by clicking here.
Norton has reduced the focus on music and painting to give the cards an even broader application and simplified and Americanised the language – with some loss of charm (the classic “Honour thy error as a hidden intention” becomes “Your mistake was a hidden intention”). Californian graphic designer Pae White has created a double-sided design for each card and a sleek Corian container, while Norton’s selection from Eno’s latest revision has been translated into Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. The Shockwave version of Brian Enos Oblique Strategies is ©1996 Bryan Lewellen, DBA Raindear Media, and licensed under a Creative Commons License.Creative Commons License. For his “Fourth Again Revised and More Universal Edition”, Peter Norton, of Norton Utilities fame, spared no expense. Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas is ©1975 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Three editions were published, but the cards have been out of print since the last revision in 1979 – until now. How we are hampered by our habit of looking for a single solution Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt produced the first set of Oblique Strategies cards in 1975. “Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect … sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.” The idea is that the user draws a card at random and attempts to apply whatever instruction appears to the problem at hand: “Abandon normal instruments”, “Discard an axiom”, “What mistakes did you make last time?”, “Overtly resist change”. While recording this album, David Bowie, Brian Eno and the other musicians used a technique Eno had developed called oblique strategies to push their creative limits. This blog takes its name Planned Accidents from the working title for what later became David Bowie’s Heroes album.
“These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing,” they explained. Oblique strategies is a set of over 100 cards designed by legendary producer and musician Brian Eno in 1974 to help artists (particularly musicians) break. The answer just might lie in a deck of cards. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies – subtitled “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” - was devised in the mid-1970s as a way of circumventing ingrained habits of thought and resolving creative blocks that arose during their studio practice as musician and artist.