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optional-skills/creative/creative-ideation/references/methods/oblique-strategies.md

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+# Oblique Strategies
+
+Brian Eno + Peter Schmidt, 1975. A deck of ~110 gnomic cards for breaking studio deadlocks. Used on Bowie's *Berlin Trilogy*, *Music for Airports*, and dozens of other records.
+
+## When to use
+
+- Stuck mid-project; have material in front of you, lost contact with it
+- Recording-studio energy: tactical decisions inside a defined work
+- Group impasse: drawing a card breaks the loop without anyone needing to "be right"
+- Decision deadline: forces a move
+
+## Don't use when
+
+- Blank page (the cards assume material exists)
+- High-stakes structural decisions
+
+## Procedure
+
+1. Pick a card by random index (not by what feels appropriate — that defeats the operation).
+2. Apply it literally to the next decision in front of you. **The card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear** (Eno).
+3. Make the move it suggests.
+4. Don't over-explain. The card; what it means here; the move. Done.
+
+## The cards (working subset)
+
+### General provocations
+- Use an old idea.
+- State the problem in words as clearly as possible.
+- Only one element of each kind.
+- What would your closest friend do?
+- What to increase? What to reduce?
+- Are there sections? Consider transitions.
+- Try faking it.
+- Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
+- Ask your body.
+- Work at a different speed.
+- Repetition is a form of change.
+- Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify.
+- Not building a wall; making a brick.
+- Be dirty.
+- Take a break.
+- Just carry on.
+- Discard an axiom.
+- Towards the insignificant.
+- Give way to your worst impulse.
+- Once the search is in progress, something will be found.
+
+### On material
+- Use unqualified people.
+- Tape your mouth.
+- Disconnect from desire.
+- Distorting time.
+- Look at the order in which you do things.
+- Reverse.
+- Mute and continue.
+- Faced with a choice, do both.
+- Use fewer notes.
+- Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action; incorporate.
+- The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
+
+### On process
+- Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do.
+- Cluster analysis.
+- Emphasize differences.
+- Emphasize the flaws.
+- Emphasize repetitions.
+- Listen to the quiet voice.
+- Look at a very small object; look at its centre.
+- Lowest common denominator.
+- Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame.
+- Question the heroic.
+- Remember those quiet evenings.
+- Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities.
+- The inconsistency principle.
+- The tape is now the music.
+- Use an unacceptable colour.
+- Voice your suspicions.
+- Water.
+- Where's the edge? Where does the frame start?
+
+## Anti-slop notes
+
+- Don't generate fake "Eno-style" cards. Use the real deck.
+- Don't pad. Card → meaning here → move. Three sentences max.
+- Don't apologize when the card lands strangely. The strangeness is the operation.
+
+Full deck and history: rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies (Gregory Alan Taylor's archive).