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.”
— Brian Eno
I first ran into the Strategies in the Disinfo Daily Newsletter and had no idea what they were or why they were being quoted every day. This went on for about three years until yesterday, when I finally realized I could find out by doing a Google Search.
Now I have an applet running on my machine that calls up one of the Strategies whenever I ask it to . . . which is nice.
They’re odd things — half fortune cookie message and half creative spark. I don’t know if you could live your life by following them, like Harvey Dent with his silver dollar . . . but we can’t all be comic book psychopaths.