Oblique strategies 2

The deck itself had its origins in discovery by Brain Eno that both he and his friend Peter Schimidt.
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 that clock tick while you‘re running up big buck studio bill.
The strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking-to jog the mind.
Weather the cards were explicitly intended to be oracular at the outset or weather Schmidt and Eno necessarily saw them exclusively as a single instruction/single response”kind of “game” It is not clear how ever the introductory cards included in all three versions of the first versions of the Oblique Strategies suggest other wise.
It seems clear, also, that the deck was not conceived of asset 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.
The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in number of working situations when the panic if the situation-particularly in studios-tended to make me quickly forget that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many sense more interesting than the direct head-on approach.