Brian Eno & Peter Schmidts Oblique Strategies NU SOM APP!

I min evindelige jagt efter metoder til at bryde vanetænkning finder jeg traditionen tro tilbage til Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies et værktøj de udviklede til at tage dem videre når de gik i stå i deres arbejde.

Alle kender situationerne: Du sidder på arbejdet og skal have et dokument færdigt, du står i køkkenet og skal lave noget lækkert til gæsterne der kommer om en time? Du møder på arbejdet efter xx år og finder ud af at du må videre i din karriere men aner ikke hvordan? Du sidder og skriver den rejsemail du har glædet dig til at skrive – pludseligt falder klappen ned? Du vågner op og finder ud af at dit liv er helt forkert – du skal videre? Eller som nu hvor vi sidder i Yangon på 2. år og er kørt fast i vores drømmeprojekt?

Hvad gør du?

Oblique Strategies er en af de muligheder der har hjulpet mange ud af fastlåste situationer – situationer som eksempelvis Bowies og Eno’s arbejde med Berlin Trilogien Heroes, Low og Lodger hvor Eno brugte i den grad brugte kortene. I dette interview på BBC4 fortæller Carlos Alomar om arbejdet med Oblique Strategies – en af de vigtigste elementer medvirkende til albummenes succes.

Jeg har selv brugt dem flere gange. Første gang på EMI hvor jeg lånte et originalt sæt af Hans Otto Bisgaard, og efterfølgende – da jeg fik købt mit eget sæt – i utallige små og store situationer.

Jeg har brug for dem nu!

Mit sæt ligger i København. Heldigvis ligger kortene som en meget enkelt og funktionel APP på Google Play.

Dagens kort: Is Something Missing?

You bet!

These 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 re-meeting 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.

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.

The first Oblique Strategy said Honour thy error as a hidden intention. And, in fact, Peter’s first Oblique Strategy – done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that – was …I think it was Was it really a mistake? which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards.

At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he’d kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know…there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they’re now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.

-Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80