Wednesday July 22, 2009
I came across these recently and found it interesting, as Brian Eno is one of my favourite composers/creatives. I really want a pack.
“The Oblique Strategies are a deck of cards. Up until 1996, they were quite easy to describe. They measured about 2-3/4” x 3-3/4”. They 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 aphorisms 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 (a British painter whose works grace the cover of “Evening Star” and whosewatercolours decorated the back LP cover of Eno’s “Before and After Science” and also appeared as full-size prints in a small number of the original releases) 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 whether the cards were explicitly intended to be oracular at the outset – that is, whether or not Peter Schmidt and Eno necessarily saw them exclusively as 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.”
Words by Natalie
Wednesday June 17, 2009
I’ve been obsessed with neon lights in art and installation recently, possibly triggered by the VIVID Festival that’s been going on around Sydney.
My favourite collective, United Visual Artists, recently opened an exhibition at The Smithfield in London, and I think it’s really beautiful. It’s a bit of a departure from their usual interactive installations. They say “We travelled to the darkest depths of Britain, looking for places that had been influenced by man’s intervention but never artificially illuminated. Introducing the artificial light had a transforming effect, literally creating a new place that only existed momentarily”. Or something. The pieces are stills mounted on lightboxes.
Words by Natalie
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What were you doing on Saturday night? http://bit.ly/l566r 2009-09-23
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