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This long-overdue reissue was initiated with Eno’s co-operation, as a Christmas present for 4,000 friends and contacts. These little anecdotes are meant to assist you when youre having a tough time with the creative process. It spits out a random oblique strategy from one of the hundred included in the Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt third edition (the 1979 edition). 1975, 1978, and 1979 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. 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”). This freeware application is a handy little utility meant for creative types. Oblique Strategies is a list of ideas to help break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. 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. For his “Fourth Again Revised and More Universal Edition”, Peter Norton, of Norton Utilities fame, spared no expense.
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Three editions were published, but the cards have been out of print since the last revision in 1979 – until now.
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“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”. “These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing,” they explained. 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.