Who is Brian Eno?
Ten key insights into Brian Eno's philosophies on art and music:
- Art as Experience: Eno emphasizes that art should be seen not as static objects, but as experiences that trigger emotional responses and interactions.
- Atmospheric Influence: He believes that the environment plays a significant role in how we perceive art, suggesting that context matters deeply in the experience of creativity.
- Surrender in Creation: Eno discusses the importance of surrendering control in the creative process, allowing spontaneity and chance to influence the outcome.
- Music as Landscape: Eno often describes music in terms of physical spaces, where compositions are akin to locations that listeners can inhabit.
- Collaboration and Process: He values collaboration and collective creativity, advocating for a process-oriented approach where the journey of making art is as vital as the finished product.
- Art and Science Fusion: Eno suggests that art can help us digest scientific discoveries, bridging the gap between empirical data and human experience.
- Ambience and Sound: He pioneered ambient music, which he views as a way to enhance environments rather than overpower them, creating a background that influences mood and perception.
- Social Change: Eno sees art as a potential catalyst for social and political change, using creativity to inspire and provoke thought within societies.
- Experimental Mindset: He adopts an experimental attitude toward music-making, where starting projects without a predetermined end can lead to unexpected and innovative outcomes.
- Openness to Interpretation: Eno encourages openness to multiple interpretations of art, asserting that meaning can be derived from personal viewer or listener experiences rather than fixed artist intentions.
January 24 - Concert and Screening
- The Eno documentary screening party is Jan 24th starting at 7pm in the Media Theater across from Einstein's.
- If you'd like to be a tech for the event let me know in class.
- Live band "955" starts 7:30pm in Studio A -
- Film Screening 9pm in Media Theater across from Einsteins.
Assignment 1 - Open this link in a browser and let it play out loud in the room as you work.
Assignment 2 - Watch the video below on Eno's creative process. Take notes, post to page with a screen shot of a good visual from this video.
ASSIGNMENT and RECAP
STOP HERE 2025/01/22
What are Oblique Strategies?
click here to draw a card
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.
That was then, and this is now. There is now another set of the Oblique Strategies in existence, and it looks nothing like this; perhaps the best way to think of the differences between the earlier versions and the fourth edition deck is by analogy. Where the earlier versions were a quiet, well-dressed neighbor who, once you got used to her/him, turned out to be a funny, intriguing, and frighteningly prescient friend, the 1996 version is the equivalent of going to the other apartment on your floor to ask directions to someplace and discovering a large, noisy party full of tipsy graduate students attempting some kind of fashionable dance en masse who pause only to give you advice in a half-dozen languages.
But I digress. Perhaps it's best to attempt a description of their intention and function.
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 whose watercolours 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.
Eno discusses the Oblique Strategies at greatest length in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian, conducted at KPFA in Berkeley in early 1980:
"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 remeeting 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
That was then, and this is now. There is now another set of the Oblique Strategies in existence, and it looks nothing like this; perhaps the best way to think of the differences between the earlier versions and the fourth edition deck is by analogy. Where the earlier versions were a quiet, well-dressed neighbor who, once you got used to her/him, turned out to be a funny, intriguing, and frighteningly prescient friend, the 1996 version is the equivalent of going to the other apartment on your floor to ask directions to someplace and discovering a large, noisy party full of tipsy graduate students attempting some kind of fashionable dance en masse who pause only to give you advice in a half-dozen languages.
But I digress. Perhaps it's best to attempt a description of their intention and function.
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 whose watercolours 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.
Eno discusses the Oblique Strategies at greatest length in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian, conducted at KPFA in Berkeley in early 1980:
"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 remeeting 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
Assorted links to Brian Eno resources
- Eno, Brian. A Year with Swollen Appendices. London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
- This book is a collection of Eno's writings, providing insights into his thoughts on music, art, and creativity.
- Eno, Brian. On the High Ledge: A Breakdown of Boredom. In The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, edited by Margaret A. Boden. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
- Eno discusses the creative process and the importance of experience and experimentation in art.
- Eno, Brian. Music for Airports. Album. 1978.
- This landmark ambient music album illustrates his approach to sound environments and the listener's experience.
- Eno, Brian, and Peter Schmidt. Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. 1975.
- A set of cards to help artists break creative blocks and encourage randomness in the creative process.
- Eno, Brian. The Ship. Album. 2016.
- An exploration of music as immersive experience, blending ambient soundscapes with conceptual art.
- Eno, Brian. Another Green World. Album. 1975.
- This album reflects Eno's ideas on blending art and music, focusing on atmosphere and emotion.
- Eno, Brian. Creating Space: A Personal Reflection on Rauschenberg, Storr and the Contemporary. In Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, edited by John Elderfield. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2017.
- Eno reflects on art and its impact on social landscapes.
- Eno, Brian. The Visual Language of Music: Brian Eno’s Influences in Music and Art. In The Art of Sound: A Critical Study of Sound Artist History, edited by Jennifer Allen. New York: Routledge, 2013.
- An exploration of Eno's influence on sound art and composition.
- Eno, Brian. Ambient Music: The Evolution of a Genre. In The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, edited by Nick Collins and Julio d'Escrivan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Eno discusses ambient music and its role in changing the perception of sound.
- Eno, Brian. The Music of the Spheres. The New York Times, January 7, 2014.
