Do you ever wonder how you could have been in the orbit of something for so long and still not actually encounter it?
The good news is when said elusive thing finally crosses your path you can add it to your stockpile of knowledge, and quickly deploy it. As I like to say: You learn something new every day. If you're lucky.
The other week I got that kind of lucky and learned about something called Oblique Strategies.
It happened at a recent talk given by British media studies academic David Gauntlett, who now holds a chair in Creative Innovation at Toronto's Ryerson University. The topic was his current focus on the meaning and ramifications of creativity being everywhere, which happens to also be the subject matter of his forthcoming book An Experimental Culture Of All Kinds of Things Made By Everybody. In a nutshell the idea is that creativity is more inclusive than ever. And being done in more ways and for more reasons than ever. Whether it's handmade products and objects or the video and audio productions of the hundreds of thousands YouTubers and podcasters out there, we live in a time in which the means of production are open to more people than ever. (Whether or not people can make a living in this new widely distributed world of making is another story, and for those wishing to dig deeper into that topic, there's this recently released comprehensive study of the creative economy.)
As Gauntlett puts is on his website: "...Social change comes from small things as well as big movements, and from constructions of shared meaning and experience. The vision of an experimental culture of all kinds of things made by everybody can still be achieved."
Now back to those Oblique Strategies. In the course of the talk Gauntlett referred to them. They're not a thing as much as they are a practice. A way to unblock creative blocks. A kind of cleaning flush for the espresso machines of our minds. The Oblique Strategies are the work of pioneering experimental musician Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt.
So what are they?
They're actually decks of cards, available since 1975, in a variety of editions. To give you a taste, here are a handful of oblique strategies from the original 1975 deck:
- Discard an axiom
- Emphasise the flaws
- Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate
- Use an old idea
- Use 'unqualified' people
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Source:
http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/
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In a 1980 interview on KPFA Berkeley Eno described the origins of Oblique Strategies this way:
"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."
And because we're now in 2019 of course there are unboxing videos of people doing just that with the Oblique Strategies cards.
And in a related story David Gauntlett has his own card deck too, of great thinkers from the often cross-pollinating fields of media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Sheet 1 can be found here and look, here's sheet 2.