Oblique Strategies Box

Over Spring Break we had two assignments to finish for Programming A to Z. The first was to modify, augment, or create a program based on our in-class examples of context-free grammars. I originally planned to create a grammar for walking– some sort of computer-generated dérive– but the weather hasn’t been particularly conducive to walking. This dreary March weather has put me into a bit of a creative slump, so I decided to make something to help shake my brain up a bit: I wrote a grammar based on the 1979 edition of Brain Eno & Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, and I fed it to Adam’s ContextFilter. It’s a little wonky since the structures of Eno & Schmidt’s instructions are so diverse, but it’s spit out a few interesting phrases so far. Here are a few of its suggestions:

breathe more deeply

burn more often

disconnect from always time

decorate dirty disciplined things

consider cascades

build and abandon extravagant transitions

destroy sections

burn normal cascades and build first instruments

dirty an easement

don’t be frightened to display and discard

use desire as an anchor