The Last Thing on the List

Welcome to our little place here at the corner of Technology and Creativity. Now we all love our technology, and certainly it enables us to do amazing things with music, with pictures, with ideas. But sometimes I think it becomes a bit of a burden. We feel a responsibility to all that technology, all those possibilities.

It's important to remember who is working for whom. A good role model in this area is Brian Eno, renowned producer, recording artist, and creative strategist. (If you’re not already familiar with Eno and his place in modern culture, by all means see his Wikipedia page or the unofficial but definitive EnoWeb.) His approach to technology is experimental and playful, grounded in the idea that the technology works for you, not the other way around. You can read the manual or not. You can explore all the nifty features or concentrate on the one thing that really interests you. You can use it in the way it was intended to be used, or in any way you please. You are a human being, and without you all that technology wouldn't know what to do.

It is also helpful sometimes to narrow the possibilities a bit: to impose constraints or introduce a random or semi-random factor that leads you in a particular direction. Eno also has innovated in these areas. He coined the term "generative music" to describe music initiated by a series of choices (i.e. constraints) and left to evolve on its own. And to spur creative thinking or break artistic logjams, he developed the "Oblique Strategies," a set of cards designed with the artist Peter Schmidt. Each card contains a sort of aphorism or Zen koan intended to reframe your thinking on whatever project you happen to be working on at the time. The idea is that when you reach a creative impasse, you draw a card at random and follow its advice.

The Strategies first appeared in 1975 and have been periodically revised over the years. Today the 5th edition of the cards is available at the EnoShop for perhaps more than you’d like to pay (though it must be said that as a physical object the set of cards is awfully cool). In the interest of fiscal responsibility I recently set out to find online versions that would enable me to benefit from the same advice famously given to David Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, and many others (including of course U2 and Coldplay, but never mind about that).

I found a couple of sites that purported to give links to online versions of the Strategies, but unfortunately none of these seemed to work. Even the links on EnoWeb led to dead ends and ghost towns. One of these was supposed to be a link to a hypercard stack, which you kids out there won’t even recognize as something that was really cool back in 1992. It seems that in the Web’s earlier days, a lot of people had the idea of creating an online Oblique Strategies, and none of them have bothered to maintain the sites.

I did finally manage to find a working, although very plain, version here. The first card it gave me was this:

Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic

This is advice I could have used a few weeks back when I was trying to create a collage from a bunch of pictures of different sizes and shapes. I fiddled with different arrangements for hours but never came up with anything satisfactory. Then I decided to crop each one into squares of the same size. The resulting design was pleasingly symmetrical and made some order out of the chaos. (The converse of this Strategy--"humanize something free of error"--is equally useful.)

Further digging turned up a Yahoo Oblique Widget, which is rather more pleasing to the eye. It had this to tell me:

Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list

Now this is just plain good advice. If you're like me, when you make a to-do list, the last thing on it is the thing you least want to do, and therefore the thing you should probably do first. Now that's probably not exactly what Eno had in mind--I think he meant to embrace the seemingly unlikely or insignificant--but the beauty of this is, you can go wherever it leads you. Sometimes just the act of taking a moment to think makes all the difference, and this is where the Oblique Strategies are perhaps most helpful. So why not get yourself the widget, or bookmark the site (or better yet this blog entry), and give it a shot the next time you get stuck. Let me know how that turns out for you.