{"id":5268,"date":"2014-08-20T02:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T02:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eoisabi.org\/?p=5268"},"modified":"2026-03-24T21:10:59","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T21:10:59","slug":"brian-eno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/englishroam.com\/?p=5268","title":{"rendered":"Brian Eno"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Oracle<\/p><\/div>\n

Here’s an extract from Brian Eno<\/strong>‘s explanation of this random collection of maxims or aphorisms aimed at helping artists approach their work.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u21d0 \u00abThese cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn’t seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting 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.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Oblique Strategies<\/strong> 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<\/strong> was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, \u00abDon’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,\u00bb or \u00abDon’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.\u00bb<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

-Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2\/1\/80<\/strong><\/span><\/pre>\n
There are lots of versions of this set of cards devised by Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt. \u00a0Here’s two more:<\/span><\/p>\n
\u2022\u2192‘Random Oblique Strategies’\u21d0<\/a>\u00a0 \/ \u00a0\u2022\u00a0<\/strong>White on black:\u2192‘Oblique_Strategies<\/a><\/em>‘\u21d0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
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